Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky said on Wednesday he opposes the new omnibus spending bill, and wants his Republican colleagues to take a stand against runaway spending that Democrats are going to put into the bill.
On Fox Business’s Kudlow show, Paul said that his fellow Republicans are “emasculated” and have ceded power to the Democrats.
The way the Republicans can get spending in line, he suggested, is to “divide the spending into 12 bills and then decide to hold one of them hostage or two of them hostage. And then apply policy changes in the House. But they’ve got to do it.”
“They’ve got to capture this, and we’d have to do the budget the way it’s supposed to be. Budget — 12 appropriation bills, then try to attach some policy like removing the 87,000 IRS agents from the IRS budget,” Paul said.
Paul, a conservative Republican who ran for president in 2016, pointed out how Republicans always cave.
“When we try to do it in one bill, Republicans don’t have the intestinal fortitude. They always collapse, and they fear shutting government down, so no policy objectives ever get added,” he said.
Senate negotiators on Tuesday reached what they call a bipartisan framework agreement for funding the remainder of the federal government’s fiscal 2023, and avoiding a government shutdown on Friday
Congress is expected to pass a continuing resolution by Friday to avoid the shutdown and give the lawmakers until Dec. 23 to finalize and pass the final agreement.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., who will be the incoming House Speaker, has reportedly told his caucus members that he was a “no” on the omnibus bill and had asked Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to approve continuing resolutions into January, when Republicans can at least take control of the House and have more leverage in negotiations.
But it appears that the fix is in with McConnell and the Democrats — and some Republicans — in the Senate.
