Sen. Rand Paul slams Speaker Johnson: 'This is abdicating the power of the purse'

Senator Rand Paul. Senator, it’s great to see you this morning and I want to get into the COVID situation in a moment. But first, more pressing situations this morning after the attack from Iran into Israel, your reaction, You know, I think we’re very fortunate that it was ineffective and that Israel’s and US defenses were able to stop 97% of this. But I think one question that’s not being asked enough this morning is everybody’s asking what is the next step to escalation. There’s another question, what are the possibility that we could de escalate the situation? You know, every action has a reaction. Hamas attacked on October 7th. Awful, dreadful. Israel kills 2 generals now Iran attacks. So every action has a reaction. And is there a possibility that this could be de escalated at this point? And I think people ought to take a breath, wait a little bit. Medicine, We’re taught to check your own pulse before you check the patient’s pulse. You need to calm down and think with a clear head before we move forward. So what do you want to do in terms of moving forward in the Senate with regard to the conversation around a new supplemental package which would send money to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan? You know, I haven’t supported foreign aid really in my tenure in the Senate, but I did support foreign aid that was paid for to Israel not too long ago. This was passed in the House, and then every Democrat in the Senate voted against foreign aid that was paid for him. What I would say to Speaker Johnson is hold your ground. Show some cojones, Show some industrial fortitude. For goodness sakes, you’ve already passed aid to Israel. Tell Chuck Schumer when he’s ready to take it up, take it up. But it’s going to be paid for. It’s a great precedent if Speaker Johnson will stick by his guns. I have a feeling that we’re going to see capitulation. There’s already talk of a new one that’s unpaid for. Why in the world would Republicans negotiate with themselves? Tell Chuck Schumer, bring it up. It’s been sitting in the Senate for two months now. If they want more aid to Israel, bring it up. But we’re going to have to cut somewhere else to pay for it. I I want to also ask you about what you heard from the Speaker regarding FISA. Can we trust government? Can we trust government to use FISA appropriately and legally? Absolutely not. Americans shouldn’t be spied on by their own government. The 4th Amendment was put in by our founding fathers to protect us. FISA doesn’t obey the 4th Amendment and so Speaker Johnson was incredibly wrong. He broke the tie. He voted with the Democrats. Here we have the leader of the Republicans in the House votes with the Democrats against a warrant requirement. We also have Speaker Johnson voting for the spending package once again with the majority of the Democrats as I see it now, I’m not sure there’s a difference between Mike Johnson being in charge and the Democrats being in charge. The debt, the deficit this year will be 1.5 to $2 trillion. And that’s Mike Johnson’s bill. He put it forward. He supported it with a minority of Republicans, with the majority of Democrats. This is not using the power of the purse. This is abdicating the power of the purse. Well, why? Why do you think that is? You know, people have to be strong in their convictions. He was seen as a conservative before he came to the speakership, but now he puts a tweet out the other day saying, oh, they whispered to him about 702 how important it is. And now he’s completely changed and lost all his principles on the idea that we shouldn’t spy on Americans without a warrant on the spending issue. They say, oh, government will shut down, but if the Democrats want this level of spending, we want this level. A compromise would be splitting the difference. The Democrats got everything they want in the spending and all the look, Scott, what they want to this is a problem. On the Republican side. We have people who want unlimited military spending and then the Democrats want unlimited welfare spending and they get both. But Johnson hasn’t held his ground. He has power. He has a majority use the power of the purse. Speaker Johnson, do something to make us think you are different than the Democrats. But so far I don’t see a lot of difference. Wow, All of this while the border is yet to be secured? Exactly. We shouldn’t, you know, look, we have 41 Republicans in the Senate. So while I blame Speaker Johnson, I blame 41 senators in the Senate. We could stop the Senate and they could do nothing without us. If 41 of us say no, we’re not passing anything until the border is secured. Guess what? Democrats will wake up and secure the border. But we don’t use our power effectively. We abdicate. In the Senate, the same thing happens. 10 liberal big government Republicans vote with the Democrats, and the Democrats get what they want. But now Mike Johnson, Johnson’s voting with a minority of his party. He’s the leader of his party and he’s not voting with the the majority of the Republicans were for a warrant required. The majority of the Republicans were not for having a deficit of 1.5 trillion. And yet he’s siding with the Democrats. That’s ineffective leadership. And if he wants to remain speaker, frankly, he’s going to do better because, you know, I wanted to give him a break and I have for a couple months. This is the first time I’ve really spoken out. But somebody, I mean, the speaker’s got to be a speaker. He’s got to be a leader of his party, not a capitulator to the other party. What about leadership in the Senate? Who’d you like? Who would you like to see replace Mitch McConnell? Any anyone at this point would be better because he now has decided that Ukraine and sending our money to Ukraine that we have to borrow is more important than anything, including our border. The whole fiasco of getting that thing started with ineffective border control that ended up, we ended up rejecting in the end was all Senator McConnell’s idea and it was a disaster. It’s led to Democrats now saying, oh, well, look, we offered you this great border bill and you didn’t take it. It was a crummy border bill’s a crummy deal. We never should have done it. Senator, Real quick, before you go, we’ve got to get into COVID as well. You are out with a report which shows that 15, at least 15 federal agencies knew that gain and function research was being done in the Wuhan lab since, what, 2018? Yeah, we know this because a whistleblower revealed it. Nobody in the administration has told us anything. We’ve gotten all of our information from a whistleblower, but we now know it wasn’t just one agency that China was approaching. China made a presentation or an American representative, Peter Daszak made a representation to 15 agencies about creating a virus that guess what, looks suspiciously like COVID-19 and looks like no other virus in nature from that family. They were working on this and presented it to 15 agencies and in 2020 when they saw COVID-19, they should have all been calling and raising the alarm and saying, my goodness, we we saw this two years ago. We knew the Chinese were doing this. Lo and behold, they did it. Nobody in government came forward. Not one person. I take that back. A brave marine, a Lieutenant Colonel came forward and gave us that information. Or today we would still not know any of this. And and we haven’t seen any holding China to account for any of this. Not just the leak, but then the cover up that followed. The Biden administration has yet to demand answers. Yeah, the Biden administration has signed a pandemic treaty to give away all of our sovereignty. So people you know, from around the world, third world, countries that run these organizations can tell us what to do, what kind of master wear, whether we’re goggles, earmuffs and all the other ridiculous things that were offered out to put surround ourselves by plexiglass. All the moronic ideas we’ve now farmed out. It’s not bad enough to have people in the United States telling us this. They’ve farmed it out to an international treaty to let you know the the rest of the world. Tell us how we’re going to live our lives the next time something bad like this happens.