Share and Follow

When it comes to obstructing valuable initiatives, Senator Bernie Sanders appears to be channeling his inner Ebenezer Scrooge. The Vermont senator recently stood in the way of legislation designed to facilitate access to cancer treatments for children, seemingly in a bid to push his own congressional agenda.
In a move that caught many by surprise, Sanders was the lone senator to oppose a proposal aimed at expediting the availability of treatments and clinical trials for young cancer patients. The legislation also sought to encourage pharmaceutical companies to invest in developing pediatric therapies.
The bill, known as the Mikaela Naylon Give Kids a Chance Act, was named in honor of a teenage cancer patient who tragically passed away while advocating for its approval. Sanders, however, took issue with the bill’s current form, noting that it had been stripped of additional health-care provisions, including funding for community health centers, that were part of an earlier package.
Despite his support for the bill’s primary objectives, Sanders has chosen to withhold his endorsement unless these supplementary measures are reinstated. This decision has halted the bill’s progress, forcing it into a far more complicated legislative journey when Congress returns after the break.
Yet without his vote, it didn’t win unanimous backing, so it’ll now have to make its way through a much more arduous procedural process when Congress reconvenes next year.
That is, Sanders blocked an urgently needed bill in a perhaps futile attempt to get his pet projects passed.
Pray it doesn’t cost the lives of any kids who could’ve benefited. But make no mistake: This is super-villain behavior, as more rational lawmakers pointed out.
Right-wing Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who also supports funding community health centers, fumed: “To say that you’re not going to give a chance for children to have a cure for cancer if you don’t get what you want” is “selfish” and “tragic.”
Amen to that.
Too many hard-lefties think that way: Zero compromise, zero realism; just legalistic, ideology-driven insistence that things get done their way — or else. (Exhibit A: the recent government shutdown.)
Sanders has been similarly loony about data centers, claiming they’ll cost jobs. It’s the kind of logic that would have kept the world driving horse-pulled buggies.
Sanders has already made sick kids the victims of his reckless ideology; progress itself is next on the menu.