Presidential candidate Rand Paul (R-KY) has a plan to shut down the government over Planned Parenthood and he told Fox News that his plan would allow Republicans to blame Democrats for their shutdown. So tricky!
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“We got Republicans elected in the House of Representatives and in the Senate, and nothing’s changing,” Senator Paul said.
Explaining that he is against a short term CR if it funds Planned Parenthood and other things the Kentucky Senator disagrees with, Senator Paul laid out his plan to blame Democrats for the Republican shutdown.
Paul has a plan to get things done and blame Democrats for the fallout. He’s going to reverse how government works, using shock and awe. First, he’ll defund everything, because that won’t cause chaos and insanity or cause the economy to collapse.
And then Paul will make everything require 60 votes to get funded. No more pesky government programs to help the needy, the elderly, the veterans… shut it all down. Vote on everything. This, coming from the party that has worked the least amount of days, seems terribly misguided, and ambitious bordering on delusional.
“I’m one who is also frustrated. Many are saying oh it takes 60 votes, and we can’t get 60 votes to defund anything. If we let all the funding expire and then you restart it, it would take 60 votes to restart something and a lot of bad programs would fall by the wayside — including Planned Parenthood. But we would have to have the guts to stand up and say enough’s enough, it’s from now on going to take 60 votes to pass any spending.”
It’s magic! Why didn’t Majority Leader Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) think of that? Oh, that’s right, McConnell knows how government works and he knows his party cannot afford to look so reckless in an election year.
With Paul vaguely blaming his own party’s leadership for not standing up (aka, remaking government completely in the vision of the radical conservative and using even more crazy, unpopular methods to do so), Bill Hemmer asked, “Do you think John Boehner had the guts?”
“They seemed to preemptively announce, ‘We’re defeated. We can’t do anything.’ And the grassroots is frustrated with that,” the Republican from Kentucky said.
“What I would say is that I support the position we have to use the power of the purse. And I use every bit of my arguing power to say we should put the appropriations bills forward — all 12 of them, one at a time — and make the Democrats filibuster. If they’re willing to filibuster and government shuts down, we should then say, it is Democrats who have shut down the government.”
It goes without saying at this point that reality disagrees with the conservative from Kentucky. A new poll released today shows that the public, including a majority of Republicans, do not want Republicans to shut down the government, “69% of Americans and 56% of Republicans oppose shutting down the government over defunding Planned Parenthood.” Even if they can blame their brother. Additionally, a new NBC/WSJ poll shows that a combined 61% oppose totally eliminating Planned Parenthood’s federal funding, versus 35% who favor it.
So, that’s a nope to fooling the public, especially on a position they disagree with. The only people who want this are the hardcore “conservatives’. (These people are actually not conservative at all, but rather nihilistic radicals bent on destroying the government.)
The problem is that Republicans have been attacking their own country with shock and awe tactics in order to inflict their will upon the people since 2010 with various shutdowns and petulant refusals to fund the government destroying Christmas for everyone, so the public is kind of on to them. That isn’t stopping Republicans from desperately trying to sell the narrative that they can blame their next bomb on President Obama and Democrats, and the troops are out in fore trying to make that spin happen.
Shutdown Paul – abusing the power of the purse to inflict chaos so he can get his own way. Now that’s presidential.
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