Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) now officially fits the definition of a RINO, as he is siding with Democrats far more than Republicans these days.
Paul recently announced that maybe it is time to defund DHS, calling it a “bloated bureaucracy.”
Now he is talking about blocking funding for Operation Epic Fury, so he might as well have a “D” next to his name.
Democrats have drawn the line in the sand over DHS funding, saying they will not fund the agency until they see significant changes.
More specifically, they want to overhaul ICE and put in enforcement guardrails.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) stated, “If Republicans keep refusing to ensure ICE and Border Patrol follow the same basic standards that police departments across America already follow, then we should at least fund T.S.A. and FEMA while we press on with negotiations to protect Americans from violence at the hands of untrained, unidentifiable federal agents.”
Dems have offered to fund those additional agencies, but the GOP knows if it does that, it loses all leverage, so we have a stalemate.
DHS was put in place specifically to protect the homeland, but Sen. Paul is now questioning the entire existence of it.
He stated, “I don’t know how much DHS actually does. I’m one of those people who believes, of course, the FBI has an important task in trying to look for people who are in the country that might harm us.
“There are aspects of crossing of borders that make a difference, but I’m one of those who, after 9/11, thought, gosh, we’re just going to create these enormous bureaucracies that cost a lot of money but don’t necessarily make us safer.
“So, I would rather the money probably be spent specifically on detailed defenses against terrorism, as opposed to a big, bloated bureaucracy, which is what the Department of Homeland Security has become.”
My position on Operation Epic Fury has been made quite clear, as I am all for ending any form of terrorist threat, but Paul is now pushing back on that as well. He claimed the national debt is the number one threat to this country, and I don’t necessarily disagree with him on that. In fact, I was probably one of the few who pushed back against the big, beautiful bill and predicted that the national debt would be over $40 trillion when Trump left office.
Having said that, there are certain things where we need to spend money, and this is one of them. But Paul stated that he would not support supplemental funding for the military because we “spend plenty on our military” already.
I say find the waste and fraud in current spending. We have a $7 trillion budget overall, and I would bet dollars to donuts that a third of that could be trimmed by eliminating waste and fraud. Paul sits on committees that oversee some of this spending, so I would ask him, “If you were doing your job and properly overseeing this spending, then maybe we would not have such a large national debt.”
Everyone wants to blame people like Governor Tim Walz for all the fraud. Don’t get me wrong, he takes plenty of blame, but where is the accountability for the people in the federal government who are tasked with approving this funding and overseeing its spending? Once that check is written, for all intents and purposes, Congress wipes its hands of the matter. If they were doing their jobs instead of doing podcasts and writing books, maybe, just maybe, we would not be staring down the barrel of $40 trillion in debt before Trump leaves office.
