| | | Don Surber
I won't side with Dems on BBB
Where is Rand Paul's Big Beautiful Bill? He's had 14 years to write it
Senator Paul Rand is the latest Kentucky Republican to announce he’s voting Democrat on the Big Beautiful Bill. He will join Tommy Massie and the animatronic Mitch McConnell in joining Democrats to oppose cutting spending and making permanent the biggest tax cut ever.
Supporting higher taxes and opposing spending cuts are not conservative.
Paul and the other RINOs offer no alternative except codifying the DOGE cuts, but under Senate rules, the Big Beautiful Bill cannot be used to codify DOGE cuts. That requires a separate bill.
Either Paul does not know the rules after 14 years in the Senate or he is being dishonest in siding with Democrats.
Paul tweeted, “The Senate’s Big Beautiful Bill jacks up the debt ceiling by $5 trillion in its current form. No Congress in American history has ever approved a hike that massive.
“All the while, interest on the debt now tops $1 trillion a year!”
Well, the debt ceiling will be reached this summer so the choice is between shutting the entire government down and raising the ceiling—absent an immediate 50% cut in spending, of course.
Democrats are playing games and having Republicans mouth their words on CNN.
Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin claims without evidence (to use the media phrase for every utterance by President Trump) that Trump will add $22 trillion to the debt over the next 10 years.
To get that $22 trillion figure, he includes the 2017 tax cut as debt. This bill makes those tax cuts permanent. The money is not borrowed to pay taxpayers. The money is simply not taken from taxpayers. We borrow money to pay for spending.
The bill isn’t perfect. So what? Pass it and come back to draft a follow-up bill. Further cuts can be part of the codifying DOGE bill.
Upgrade to paid
Like Tommy Massie—another Kentucky peacock—Paul has become uncompromisingly insufferable. Legislation is horse-trading. He grandstands while others do his job, which is to rein in spending.
He rightly abhors the $36 trillion national debt.
But in his 14 years in the Senate, that debt grew by $22 trillion. What did he do to stop it? Nothing.
Oh, I get that he needed 50 more votes for any bill he presented. Well, why didn’t he get them? Because he’s all talk, no action. He’s a Lone Ranger without even a Tonto.
Charles Curtis, a Kaw Indian, was just one vote in the Senate for two decades early in the 20th century. He worked with his fellow Republicans, gained their trust and eventually became their majority leader, a position he used to secure birthright citizenship for all American Indians 101 years ago.
That was accomplished despite 22 Democrat senators from the Confederate states doing all they could to block him.
(If Trump’s solicitor general wants to, I believe he could use the passage of that bill now as an argument against granting citizenship to the children of illegal aliens and women on tourist visas. If Indians needed congressional approval, why wouldn’t a baby born while his rich mom from Red China was visiting America?)
House leaders sweated the details of the Big Beautiful Bill and got the best deal they could get as it passed by a single vote.
Paul dismisses their hard work and success without bothering to offer a viable alternative that would convince 215 members of the House and 50 members of the Senate and the vice president as the tie-breaker—for without the VP (and hence, President Trump) any proposal on the deficit is DOA.
Calling the president a TACO as in Trump Always Chickens Out is an ignorance for people who refuse to understand negotiation. Trump asks for the stars and settles for the moon. The chumps who are calling him a taco pay retail for everything.
Trump is kicking ass this term. He is taking no prisoners. Ask Harvard. Ask Red China. Ask the Mexican coyotes who no longer can bring so much as a flea across the border.
I beg readers not to fall into the trap of believing his legislative agenda is behind schedule. We have just entered the fifth month of this presidency. Trump has bare majorities in Congress and yet he got his major legislation through the House. Oh, it likely will be revised again but bear in mind, the RINOs in the Senate are doing psy ops right now because they really do hate Trump.
Do I have to mention this again but it took BO 14 months to get his which doctor bill passed? I call it which doctor because that’s what your insurance companies decides for you. The moment “you can keep your doctor” fell out of his mouth that you would not get to keep your doctor.
(By the way, I just got my bill for my cataract surgery. $400. Oh the actual bill was more than $8,800 but what wasn’t covered by my deductible is a problem for the hospital and the insurance company to wage. My eyesight is worth $8,800 and I only had to pay $400.)
Obama had a huge majority in the House and a filibuster proof Senate and at this point in his presidency, he did not even have a bill to vote on.
Whether you favor or oppose the Big Beautiful Bill depends on whether you trust Trump or you trust Democrats.
Stephen Miller, Trump’s top policy director, tweeted:
I’ve seen a few claims making the rounds on the Big Beautiful Bill that require correction.
The first is that it doesn’t “codify the DOGE cuts.” A reconciliation bill, which is a budget bill that passes with 50 votes, is limited by Senate rules to “mandatory” spending only—e.g. Medicaid and Food Stamps. The Senate rules prevent it from cutting “discretionary” spending—e.g. the Department of Education or federal grants. The DOGE cuts are overwhelmingly discretionary, not mandatory. The bill saves more than 1.6 TRILLION in mandatory spending, including the largest-ever welfare reform. A remarkable achievement.
I’ve also seen claims the bill increases the deficit. This lie is based on a CBO accounting gimmick. Income tax rates from the 2017 tax cut are set to expire in September. They were always planned to be permanent. CBO says maintaining *current* rates adds to the deficit, but by definition leaving these income tax rates unchanged cannot add one penny to the deficit. The bill’s spending cuts REDUCE the deficit against the current law baseline, which is the only correct baseline to use.
Another fantastically false claim is that the bill spends trillions of dollars. This is just completely invented out of whole cloth. This is not a ten year budget bill—it doesn’t “fund” almost any operations of government, which are funded in the annual budget bills (which this is not). In other words, if this bill passed, but the annual budget bill did not, there would be no government funding. Under the math that critics are using, if we passed a one paragraph reconciliation bill that cut simply 50 billion in food stamp spending, they would say the bill “added” trillions in spending and debt because they are counting ALL the projected federal spending that exists entirely outside the scope of this legislation, which is of course preposterous. The only funding in the bill is for the President’s border and defense priorities, while enacting a net spending cut of over 1.6 TRILLION dollars.
The bill has two fiscal components: a massive tax cut and a massive spending cut. Miller knows what is in the bill because he participated in building it. Paul goes by what Democrats tell him and what the media reports, which are of course the same thing.
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The senator is playing MAGA right now. He knows we don’t trust politicians. While President Trump against all odds gets his promises done, Paul listens to Democrats. Does anyone really believe that Trump is lying about cutting the budget?
Did he lie about Obama using the FBI to spy on him? Did he lie about Russiagate? Did he lie about NATO? He has earned our trust. Sorry, but Paul hasn’t.
Miller tweeted:
The 1981 Reagan Tax cuts, justly celebrated by libertarians, contained no spending cuts.
The 2025 Trump Tax Cut also includes more than 1.6 TRILLION in mandatory spending cuts.
The same libertarians should be celebrating.
Miller knows the first rule of libertarians is to do nothing and then complain that nothing gets done.
Paul doesn’t want to get anything accomplished. He just wants to go on TV to brag about his fiscal purity. But as my mother would say, it’s time to shit or get off the pot. Paul must be very, very constipated because the Big Beautiful Rand Paul Budget Bill does not exist.
There is no simple solution to high taxes and high debt, only simple people. Trump has made it his mission. For all the talk about codifying the DOGE cuts, there would be no DOGE cuts without Trump because he hired Elon Musk.
As I said, Massie, Paul and McConnell are all Kentucky Republicans. Maybe we can get along better with 49 states. |
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