Sen. Chuck Schumer used an appearance Sunday at one of the Manhattan subway stations inundated by flash-flooding from Hurricane Ida to stump for President Biden’s massive spending plans.
Speaking outside the West 28th Street station on Seventh Avenue in Chelsea, the Democratic Senate majority leader said that both the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill and $3.5 trillion Dem spending plan would help cities such as New York better prepare for flood events, including the one that killed dozens across the region Thursday.
“If you want any evidence that global warming is upon us and more strongly than ever before, just look at what’s going on. Hurricanes in the south and the northeast, forest fires across the west,” Schumer said.
“That’s why we need big, bold action to protect us from future storms and prevent future storms from coming,” he said. “The two bills that we have before us in Congress are a one-two punch.”
Democrats hope to ram the $3.5 trillion bill, including tax hikes and social spending, through Congress without any Republican votes using special rules.
Schumer touted the $10 billion for subways and many more dollars for flood protection included in the bipartisan plan — which he called “the resilience bill” — and said the larger proposal’s polluter fees would “stop global warming in its tracks.”
“The resilience bill, once you have the disease, deals with the cure, once the hurricanes occur, preventing so much flooding,” Schumer explained. “But the reconciliation bill deals with stopping the disease itself by greatly reducing the amount of carbon dioxide that goes into our atmosphere, creates global warming, which creates the hurricanes, the floods and the fires that we have seen this week across America.”