Paul: Someone had to sound deficit alarm
Republican leaders incensed at senator for brief shutdown.
Republicans are all Keynesians now, but not Rand Paul.
As he forced a brief government shutdown overnight to draw attention to his party’s hypocrisyon deficit spending, Kentucky’s junior senator was the personification of William F. Buckley’s definition of conservatism: standing athwart history, yelling stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.
“I ran for office because I was very critical of (Barack) Obama’s trillion-dollar deficits. Now we have Republicans hand-in-hand with Democrats offering us trillion-dollar deficits,” Paul said during a floor speech, as he predicted that “a day of reckoning” is coming. “I can’t in all good honesty, in all good faith, just look the other way because my party is now complicit in the deficits.”
The deal’s passage was never in doubt: Majority Leader Mitch McConnell knew he had 71 senators ready to vote for it, and Speaker Paul Ryan had the votes locked up in the House by Thursday morning. But Paul wanted the chance to introduce an amendment, and he used the procedural prerogatives of a senator to throw up roadblocks until about 1:30 a.m. Friday, when the time allotted for debate expired.
The House passed the bill just after 5:30 a.m. on a 240186 vote, with 167 Republicans voting yes and 67 voting no. Democrats contributed 73 votes to get it across the finish line. President Donald Trump was at the White House waiting to quickly sign it to reopen the government after what amounted to a partial seven-hour shutdown.
The bill authorizes the U.S. government to spend about $500 billion more over the next two years and suspends the debt ceiling until 2019. Most of the additional spending is not offset with cuts elsewhere, which means that the $20 trillion national debt will grow significantly. Sixty percent of the new money goes to the military; the rest goes to domestic programs.
This is the largest increase in federal spending since the stimulus passed during the depths of the Great Recession. Republicans almost universally opposed that bill in 2009, which cost $787 billion over 10 years, on the grounds that it would increase the debt too much. The only difference between now and then is that the economy is firing on all cylinders and doesn’t need stimulus.
Rand doesn’t have a totally clean nose here. He voted in December for the tax bill that will grow the debt by more than $1 trillion over the next decade — and probably more. His pushback is that overhauling the code will generate economic growth to offset the lost revenue.
Because Republicans slashed taxes and are now jacking up spending, the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget forecasts that this bill will ensure permanent trillion-dollar deficits. The projected deficit in 2019 is now $1.1 trillion, compared to $439 billion in 2015. (Don’t forget, Trump called for an additional $1.5 trillion infrastructure package during his State of the Union.)
GOP leaders are incensed at Paul, and members in both parties were perturbed that they had to burn the midnight oil. If he had fallen in line, they could have gone to bed at a reasonable hour. McConnell, who was visibly irritated when his fellow Kentuckian objected to his motion to end debate Thursday night, might have remembered why he went all-in for Paul’s primary opponent back in 2010. John Cornyn, McConnell’s No. 2, called what Paul was doing “grossly irresponsible” and said that they wouldn’t give in to his demand for amendments: “Why reward bad behavior?” John Thune, the No. 3 in GOP leadership, called it “a colossal waste of everybody’s time” and said Paul “never gets a result.”
But making his fellow Republicans uncomfortable was the whole point of the exercise. “Some will say, ‘You’re responsible for this, it’s all your fault.’ Well, if I’m responsible for drawing attention to the debt, so be it,” Paul said. “Somebody had to do it. I didn’t come here to be a part of someone’s club. I didn’t come up here to be liked. I didn’t come here to just say, ‘Hey guys, I’m going to be part of the club, so I’m going to do what you tell me to do.’ ”
To be sure, Paul is not the only Republican lawmaker worried about the debt. Bob Corker, the retiring senator from Tennessee, accused his party of “doubling down on the irresponsible mentality in Congress of spend now, pay later.” The House Freedom Caucus, which has about three dozen members, came out strongly against the measure. The Koch political network, Heritage Action and the Club for Growth tried unsuccessfully to mobilize their supporters against the deal.
But most GOP lawmakers have stopped caring too much about the issue. A big reason is that their base stopped caring. Polls show that the deficit has dwindled as a concern over the past few years, especially since Obama left office.