Responding to criticism leveled by President Barack Obama in his weekly video address, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell accused the president on Sunday of politicizing the financial regulatory reform bill.
"He is the one who is trying to politicize this issue," McConnell said on CNN's "State of the Union." "We are the ones who are trying to get it right. When the Kentucky bankers tell that this bill is a long way from being what we ought to pass, then it raises some concerns with me. And I think it does with all of our colleagues across the country who are hearing the same thing."
McConnell has taken heat from the Obama administration and Democratic congressional leaders for meeting with at least two dozen top Wall Street executives and then coming out against banking reform.
"He made the cynical and deceptive assertion that reform would somehow enable future bailouts when he knows that it would do exactly the opposite," Obama said in the video address, referring to McConnell.
But on "State of the Union" McConnell repeated assertions that the bill amounted to another bailout for banks and said that Obama and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner were not on the same page on the issue.
"He ought to talk to his own treasury secretary, who agrees with me, as well as the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, that there is a bailout fund in the bill that was reported out of the Banking Committee, the partisan bill that came out of committee on a party-line vote," McConnell said.
When CNN host Candy Crowley pressed McConnell, saying that banks would have to fork over money for the fund not taxpayers, the Kentucky Republican replied: "Regardless of where the - how the money is produced, it is a bailout fund that sort of guarantees in perpetuity that we'll be intervening once again to bail out these big firms."
Watch Obama's video address: