A top GOP senator has called on his Republican colleagues to grow a backbone.
Bemoaning that “everybody is falling in lockstep” over President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” on government spending, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul further warned that “conservatives do need to stand up and have their voices heard.”
“Somebody has to stand up and yell, ‘The emperor has no clothes!’” Paul said during an exasperated sit-down with Fox News.
An avowed libertarian, Rand has long modelled himself as a stalwart crusader against federal spending and “government waste.” He has long called on the United States government to balance its budget.
“If we don’t stand up on it, I really fear the direction the country is going,” he added.
The budget bill contains significant tax cuts, particularly for high-earners, and outlines slashes to Medicaid of $700 million and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program of $280 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The bill now awaits review by the Senate after House Republicans approved the legislation on Thursday.
According to a report from the Joint Committee on Taxation, the GOP bill could cost $2.8 trillion over the next decade—a large portion of which is due to extended tax cuts—which prompted Moody’s Ratings to downgrade the nation’s credit rating.
For the most part, Rand said during his Saturday interview that he feels the spending cuts envisioned by the Trump administration are too “wimpy and anemic.”
Along with other proposals contained in the bill, he suggested that if the reductions to federal expenditures don’t go further, it will likely “explode” the estimated $36 trillion in national debt.
“This is more of the same,” he said of Trump’s proposals. “It’s what the Democrats have always done, and this is Republicans using the same playbook.”
Paul’s claims have often attracted ridicule, as when he suggested last December that the Biden administration had wasted “hundreds of billions” of dollars on ice-skating drag queens, magic, and cocaine for quails.
Despite his initial praise for Elon Musk‘s cost-cutting initiative at the Department of Government Efficiency, Paul has emerged as a rare voice of dissent from within GOP ranks on other aspects of the new economic policies being pursued by the White House, including Trump’s ongoing trade war against much of the rest of the planet.
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