The Kentucky senator has yet to decide whether to really get on fellow senators’ nerves by delaying a massive spending bill.
Rand Paul is keeping everyone in suspense yet again.
The junior senator from Kentucky is refusing to rule out forcing another brief government shutdown over his protests of the $1.3 trillion spending bill, which he has called “budget-busting” and a return to “Obama spending and trillion-dollar deficits.” Fellow senators are trying desperately to persuade him to let the Senate vote on the spending bill Thursday and avoid unnecessarily keeping them in town on Friday and into the weekend.
Paul was noncommittal on Thursday as he walked into a Republican caucus lunch. He said he had more than 2,000 pages of the 2,200-page bill left to get through before he would decide how to proceed.
“I’m on page 56 right now, and so I’ve got a few more pages to read. I don’t have any other comment,” Paul said. A few hours later he tweeted that he was on page 207 of the “monstrous” bill and began singling out pieces of the bill for criticism.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) continued to try to set up a vote before the shutdown deadline, but made a procedural move that would allow the Senate to begin advancing the bill on Saturday at 1 a.m. That would mean another brief lapse in government funding, making it the third shutdown of the year.
Republicans had hoped that they could produce the spending deal much earlier this week to evade Paul's procedural protests and give the Senate time to pass the bill without the possibility of a shutdown. But top congressional leaders released the bill at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, infuriating Paul and other conservatives who say it is not nearly enough time to review the legislation.
"We don’t want leverage. We want a real process and time to debate, amend and vote," a Paul aide said. "It’s not too much to ask but [Senate leaders] refuse to do it, time after time."
Under Senate rules, all 100 senators must agree to hold a vote before the Friday night shutdown deadline. But as of now, they don’t have it. The House cleared the massive spending measure on Thursday. R
“It’s just a question of if he delays the vote. It doesn’t change anything,” Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), the No. 3 Senate Republican, said of Paul. “I don’t think anybody knows and I don’t think his staff knows [what he's going to do] … it’s his right and his prerogative if he wants to do it.”
