Rand Paul and the Republicans:
Then, as an expected vote approached in the Senate, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) began to throw up roadblocks, demanding a vote on an amendment that would demonstrate how the two-year budget deal breaks past pledges to rein in federal spending.
GOP leaders refused to allow him to offer the amendment, arguing that if Paul got an amendment vote many other senators might want one, too. Paul, in turn, refused to allow the vote to go forward, making use of Senate rules that allow individual senators to slow down proceedings that require the consent of all.
“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,” Paul said on the Senate floor as evening pushed into night.
Paul objected after a visibly irritated McConnell tried to move to a vote. Then Paul launched into a lengthy floor speech deriding bipartisan complicity on deficit spending while the country goes “on and on and on finding new wars to fight that make no sense.” The senator direly predicted a “day of reckoning,” possibly in the form of the collapse of the stock market.
That’s not the lede of the story. It took them 9 grafs to get to Rand. “Congressional dysfunction” was in the lede.
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