WhatFinger


It's what he does

Libertarian pretending to be a Republican jeopardizes tax reform by threatening no vote



Just days ago, Rand Paul told President Trump he planned to support the Republican tax reform proposal. Trump took that as good news. This may be the greatest example to date of Trump not having learned how things work on Washington. Rule 1: Don't trust Rand Paul. He's a fraud. He will tell you he wants to achieve certain policy objectives, and you will like the things he says he favors. But he will sabotage these priorities every time, always claiming the proposal isn't good enough, or honest enough, or pure enough . . . or something enough. Remember, Rand Paul is not a Republican. He's a libertarian who ran as a Republican because the Libertarian Party can't get above 1 percent of the vote, because it doesn't deserve to get above 1 percent of the vote.
So when you need Rand Paul to pass a Republican imperative, bad news: You're not going to pass it. And he usually finds, er, novel reasons to say no while claiming to be acting on principle. With tax reform, he is doing it again:
Senate Republicans scrambled on Tuesday to ensure support for a budget resolution vital to President Donald Trump’s drive to overhaul the U.S. tax code, as one Republican fiscal hawk announced he might vote against the measure. As the Senate opened debate on a fiscal year 2018 budget, Senator Rand Paul objected to spending levels that he said would exceed agreed caps by $43 billion, and called for spending reforms for so-called entitlement programs such as the Medicare and Medicaid health insurance programs. “I will not vote for the budget unless it keeps within the spending caps,” the Republican senator told reporters. In a conversation with Trump earlier on Tuesday, Paul said he told the Republican president: “I‘m all in. I want to be supportive. I‘m a ‘yes’ vote. But we have to obey our own rules.” Senate Republican aides denied that the budget resolution exceeds federal spending caps set by the Budget Control Act of 2011. Paul said the excess spending was for overseas military operations, which aides said are not subject to caps.

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The budget resolution already had a narrow path to passage in the Senate, where Democrats oppose the measures and Republicans have only a 52-48 majority. A “no” vote from Paul appeared to put the budget a single vote from failure, threatening to upend Trump’s drive for tax reform.
You may be tempted to give Paul credit for his stance on the spending caps. You shouldn't. Every senator understands what falls under the caps and what doesn't. When Paul says he's on board Monday and then reverses course on Tuesday, he's making up new understandings of the rules in order to do that. If you want to say the money for overseas military operations should be included in the caps, that's fine. But they're not and they never have been, so Rand Paul is engaging in utter dishonesty when he claims he has to oppose that spending to stay within the rules. He doesn't. The rules require no such thing. You may be tempted to give Paul credit for wanting to reform the entitlement programs. You shouldn't, not because that wouldn't be a good thing to do - it would be - but because this is a classic Rand Paul tactic of refusing to vote for a good idea because you can always find something else that could be done as well. Sure you could. But until it's actually possible to do those good things, you should do the good things you can do. Paul always prevents that from happening and claims it was in the service of advocating something better. The only problem is that the something better never happens. Nothing at all happens. Often because Rand Paul turns around and stabs his colleagues in the back. GDP growth for Obama's final year? A measly 1.6 percent Conservatives, stop trusting this guy and stop holding him up as a paragon of principle. He is not. He is the worst kind of person - one who talks and talks and talks and talks and never does anything. Ever. Those of you who have voted for Rand Paul because you liked the policy objectives he said he wanted, let me ask you this: How many of them have ever been enacted? Name me even one. You can't. Because none of them have. Because Rand Paul accomplishes nothing. Ever. He stands in the way of people who would like to at least make some progress in the direction of the things he says he wants. And he never, ever achieves his own objectives. And if he doesn't it again on tax reform, he'll have saved the Byzantine tax code that is crushing prosperity in this country, just like he saved ObamaCare. Some principled here you've got yourselves there. Rand Paul is a fraud. If you still haven't figured that out, you're just in denial.


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Dan Calabrese -- Bio and Archives

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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