Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) hopes to make the “big, beautiful bill” much “better” — not to “stop” it, he said during an appearance on Breitbart News Daily.
Paul, a critic of the bill now in the U.S. Senate, told host Mike Slater that he has maintained throughout his time as senator that debt is a problem.
“One of the things that I’ve always promised is that the debt is a problem — that has to come down — and that the debt is a bipartisan problem, that I’m an equal opportunity critic of both parties. You know, they have to — they have to do a better job. I’m conservative before I am anything else,” Paul said. “I’m a fiscal conservative.”
“But the thing is, is I can tell you my goal’s not to stop bill. My goal’s to make it better,” he explained. “So really, there is a compromise. Short term, short term increase in the debt ceiling, or separate into a separate vote, and you have my vote. But it can’t be — I’m not enough to stop this bill. Anyway, it takes four people. So I’ve been advocating and wish there were four that were as loud as I am, because we’d have had this fixed months ago,” Paul explained.
“You know, if four people would have stood up in March in the Senate or in January, when I began talking about this, the bill would have been changed, because they could have never written it. It’s harder now, because it’s passed the House, but it still could be changed on our side. In fact, our side is wanting to borrow more. They want to borrow $5 trillion, and the House borrowed $4 trillion. So our side’s even worse than … the House side as far as the borrowing goes,” the Kentucky senator said, expressing hope that it can still be remedied.
However, he said that will only happen if there are four senators who agree.
“Ron Johnson is speaking up now. He’s talked a lot about the spending levels being too high, and he’s absolutely right that if this bill passes at the end of the year, the deficit is going to be two trillion, then next year is going to be two trillion, and on and on. Really, there is no reverse,” he said, explaining that his opposition is not a criticism of President Trump.
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“I like the president. You know, I’ve played golf with him a dozen times. I like him personally. You know, I investigated the assassination attempt and did everything possible to make sure that it didn’t happen again. I voted against two impeachments. I led the second opposition, in the sense that I led the fight calling it unconstitutional to impeach someone who’s not President, which is a pretty strong argument. And by having that vote at the initiation of the second impeachment, basically derailed the whole thing, because once they saw we had over 40 votes saying it was unconstitutional to impeach an ex-president, they really had no chance of impeaching him,” Paul said, wishing Trump were a “little more appreciative of the things I have done.”
“The vast majority of things that I’ve done have been supportive of him,” he noted.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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