Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch “un-American,” attacking them for the political ads being run against Democrats by Americans For Prosperity, a group funded by them.
Americans For Prosperity has been bombarding Democrats running for Senate this year with attack ads.
“I can’t say that everyone of the Koch Brothers ads are a lie, but I’ll say this, Mr. President, the vast, vast majority of them are,” Reid said, speaking on the Senate floor Wednesday.
Reid went on to call their actions “dishonest, deceptive, false and unfair.”
“Just because you have huge amounts of money you should not be able to run these false, misleading ads by the hundreds of millions of dollars … When you make billions of dollars a year you can be as immoral and dishonest as your money will allow you to be,” Reid went on, specifically referencing Americans For Prosperity, which he referred to as “their front organization.”
“It’s too bad that they’re trying to buy America, and it’s time that the American people spoke out against this terrible dishonesty of these two brothers who are about as un-American as anyone that I can imagine,” he said.
Americans for Prosperity is running at least one ad in Michigan that features a woman sick with leukemia who says she is losing her health benefits. Reid, earlier on Wednesday, declared that all the “horror stories” about the health-care law, presumably such as this one, were “untrue.” Lawyers for Democratic Rep. Gary Peters, who is running for Senate in Michigan, have tried to have television stations stop running the ad.
“It is unfortunate that rather than focus on the many issues facing our country, Senator Reid chooses to attack Charles Koch and David Koch, who are proud and patriotic Americans that have devoted their lives to advancing tolerance and freedom in America,” said Philip Ellender, president of Koch Companies Public Sector, LLC.
“Koch companies proudly employ 60,000 people in the United States. Instead of waging war on private citizens, we encourage Senator Reid to work constructively to advance a free society where every individual is judged on his or her own individual merits and they are free to make decisions about their lives.”
