Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul excoriated Republican congressional leadership Tuesday morning in a speech on the Senate floor, listing off examples of wasteful government spending that he says would continue with the passage of a continuing resolution.
“What we have here is a failure to communicate, a failure to legislate and a failure to exert congressional authority,” said the libertarian-leaning senator and Republican presidential candidate, who ranks eighth in the Washington Examiner‘s presidential power rankings.
“We are told that we cannot win — that we need 60 votes to defeat anything, but perhaps there is an alternate future if we have enough courage,” he added.
Paul described the current budget battle as the “perfect time to turn the tables to tell the other side that they will need 60 votes to affirmatively spend any money.”
He joins a number of other Republican candidates who have blasted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for refusing to put forward separate spending bills or move to defund Planned Parenthood at the risk of a government shutdown.
“Our negotiating position right now is we defund nothing,” Paul said Monday. “Why don’t we start out with a negotiating position that we defund everything? All the wasteful spending, all the duplicative spending.”
The Kentucky senator indicated that such a strategy would take courage, something he says Republican leadership wholly lacks.
“Some will report on this speech and say, ‘Oh. He wants to shut down government,”” Paul asserted, before retorting, “No, I don’t.”
“I’m for exerting the power we have,” he said.
“The way we are supposed to spend money in congress is [through] 12 individual bills,” Paul continued. “Let’s present every one of them and let every American know it’s Democrats filibustering the spending bill, it’s Democrats who want to shut down the government, it’s Democrats who want to continue the status quo.”
