Rand Paul: This Democratic Claim About Trump Is 'Promoting Fear' And Untrue

4 days ago

At a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing prior to the Congressional recess, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) pushed back on claims about President Trump's priorities.

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00:00Thank you. Probably we should try to put aside some of the fear-mongering.

00:03To my knowledge, no one in the Trump administration has advocated for taking

00:08Social Security money and using it for another purpose.

00:10So that's a hypothetical that is not only untrue, it is

00:14promoting fear. We should be telling everyone in America no one's promoting

00:18that, no one's asking for that. There are some debatable points though.

00:23Nobody's advocating it from the post office either, plus the post office has

00:26no money. There are $9.5 billion in the hole every year now.

00:29But there are some real questions. The other side has called these

00:33illegal funding freezes. Well, I don't think

00:38pausing spending for a month, which is what we've had so far,

00:41will be interpreted even as impoundment. There is a debate when something is

00:46actually impounded. I think if you went through a fiscal year

00:48and you get beyond a fiscal year and you haven't spent money,

00:52it's going to be classified by anybody as impoundment. There will be a legal

00:55debate over it at that time. But there'll be a legal discussion and

00:59this is a separation of powers issue. It's an important one.

01:02I actually voted against repurposing money

01:06for the wall, for building the wall last time, because I thought it

01:09was congressional perspective. So I share some of the concerns,

01:13but I think it's unfair to leap to sort of

01:16conclusions of this is illegal or this is, you know,

01:19being done and it's democracies in turmoil and

01:23the world's going to end. I mean, when they stopped the money

01:26flowing at USAID, they found two million dollars for sex changes in Guatemala.

01:32And if the other side wants to stand up and argue that that's really wrong, that

01:36we're going to stop two million dollars for sex changes

01:38in Guatemala, they can. But instead they just say everything is illegal and Elon

01:43is terrible and Elon has all this data and Elon

01:46wasn't elected. These gentlemen weren't elected either.

01:49Their bosses won't be elected. Trump was elected. He's appointing them.

01:53So nobody in the administration is elected other than the president. They're

01:56all going to be appointed. But there's a question when you elect

01:59a president, should they get to execute their policy? Do we elect a change

02:03or is there some sort of bureaucracy that's so huge and inert that we can't

02:07move it? And that's what many of us have

02:10complained about for a long time. Some call it the deep state and the other

02:13side says, oh, they're all conniving. One of the deep state is

02:17essentially the bureaucracy that is unmovable

02:20and has a perspective. And their perspective

02:23is skewed towards spending more money, not less.

02:26You know, we should debate not whether Elon Musk is

02:30is Satan, but maybe whether or not, you know, we should spend

02:34three million dollars out of State Department funds

02:38on girl-centric climate change in Brazil. You know, whether you spend thirty

02:42thousand dollars on a trans opera in Colombia,

02:46twenty-five thousand dollars on a trans comic book in Peru,

02:50six hundred and sixty thousand on microaggressions among obese

02:57Latinx. When you say that, most people don't even know what that means.

03:01And most people are Hispanic or just frankly offended by the whole thing,

03:04whatever it's supposed to mean. All these racial sort of things and

03:09sort of, you know, left-wing sort of causes,

03:12we can debate that, whether she keeps spending money on it. But we wouldn't know

03:15it had Elon Musk not stopped things, we wouldn't even know it was being

03:19spent. So I for one think scrutiny is good, but

03:22I'm not a blank check. I've told both of the nominees today

03:26and I've told Russ Vought when it comes down to a year from now, if the

03:29money's being impounded, I'm probably going to be saying

03:32send it back and let Congress vote on it. And it's also a way of making

03:36permanence. I love all the stuff he's funding, all the waste.

03:39I want it to be permanent. I want it to have real, you know,

03:42value and we get that through a decision. Won't be easy, but it can be

03:45done through simple majority. And my guess is that the minority party,

03:50while they're squawking about Elon looking at their social security number

03:53or something, they are probably not, any of them

03:57interested in cutting the two million dollars for sex changes in Guatemala.

04:01That'll be part of a rescission package and my guess is it won't be

04:04anybody on the Democrat party that will vote for rescission

04:07of any kind of cutting. If they can, if we give them a billion dollars for an

04:12aircraft carrier and they can do it for 800 million,

04:14shouldn't we be happy to get the 200 million back, you know, and do a rescission

04:18package? I will say publicly though, giving it

04:21back to the taxpayer when we have a two trillion dollar deficit, let's fill up

04:25the hole of the two trillion dollar deficit and

04:28then we can talk about sending some back to the people. But

04:30I think it's premature to send any of that money back. It's also premature to

04:33say it's saved until we actually have a spending bill. I

04:37think next in line we have Senator Gallego.

Rand Paul: This Democratic Claim About Trump Is 'Promoting Fear' And Untrue

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