On Monday’s “Special Report,” Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul said that shutting down the government in October was a “dumb idea.”
“Well, I said throughout the whole battle that shutting down the government was a dumb idea,” Paul told Special Report panelist Charles Krauthammer. “Even though it did appear as if I was participating in it, I said it was a dumb idea. And the reason I voted for it, though, is that it’s a conundrum. Here’s the conundrum. We have a $17 trillion debt and people at home tell me you can’t give the president a blank check. We just can’t keep raising the debt ceiling without conditions.”
“So unconditionally raising the debt ceiling — nobody at home wants me to vote for that and I can’t vote for that,” he added. “But the conundrum is, if I don’t, we do approach these deadlines. So there is an impasse. In 2011, though, we had this impasse and the president did negotiate. We got the sequester. If we were to extend the sequester from discretionary spending to all the entitlements we would actually fix our problem within a few years.”
(h/t RCP Video)