Kentucky Governor Compares Critics to Drowning Victims: ‘You Just Need to Knock Them Out’

Gov. Matt Bevin, R-Ky., drew swift criticism from top state Democrats on Tuesday for his remarks that state workers who oppose pension reform are like drowning victims getting in the way of their own rescue.

“I’m being fought, in some instances, by the very people that we’re trying to save,” Bevin said Tuesday on the “Brian Thomas Morning Show,” a conservative talk show based in Cincinnati. “It’s like saving a drowning victim, Brian. It’s like somebody — they’re fighting you, biting you, pulling you under. You just need to knock them out and drag them to shore. It’s for their own good and we have to save the system.”

His remarks were quickly denounced by Democrats in his state.

“It is offensive for Governor Bevin to suggest that teachers, police officers, and public employees can’t think for themselves or make informed decisions about their own future,” Ben Self, chairman of the Kentucky Democratic Party, said in a statement.

Andy Beshear, the state’s Democratic attorney general and a candidate for governor in 2019, also called Bevin’s statement “offensive.”

A spokesman for the governor did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The comments come as Bevin hopes to preserve a pension reform bill passed earlier this year by the state’s Republican legislature, which would, among other things, make future teacher pensions more similar to private 401(k) accounts.

The day after Bevin signed that bill into law in April, Beshear and state unions representing teachers and the police sued over it. In June, a circuit court judge concluded that the law violated the state’s constitution. Bevin appealed and the case is scheduled to be argued before the Kentucky Supreme Court next month.

Kentucky’s public pension system is among the least funded in the nation, according to several analyses. It ranked second to last, ahead of only New Jersey, according to a report this year by the Pew Charitable Trusts, a nonpartisan think tank.

And Bevin’s comments Tuesday were hardly his first on pension reform to draw criticism. In March, he accused opponents of pension reform of having a “thug mentality,” according to local reports. In April, he suggested that teachers exposed children to harm by protesting the bill.

“I guarantee you somewhere in Kentucky today, a child was sexually assaulted that was left at home because there was nobody there to watch them,” he said at the time. “I guarantee you somewhere today, a child was physically harmed or ingested poison because they were home alone.”