Rand Paul: Buyoffs For Key Senators In New Obamacare Bill ‘Unseemly’

Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee member Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., questions state insurance commissioners during a hearing on the individual health insurance market for 2018 on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Sept. 6, 2017.   (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee member Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., questions state insurance commissioners during a hearing on the individual health insurance market for 2018 on Capitol Hill in Was... Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee member Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., questions state insurance commissioners during a hearing on the individual health insurance market for 2018 on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Sept. 6, 2017. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta) MORE LESS
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Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) made clear he still isn’t anywhere close to backing Republicans’ latest attempt to repeal Obamacare — and called last-ditch efforts to add buy-offs for him and other no-leaning senators “unseemly.”

“If you’re going to say the whole country is short of money, which we are … everybody should get the same thing,” he told reporters Monday afternoon, ripping the last-second cash infusions Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have made for states like Kentucky and Alaska, home of Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), a key undecided vote. “No, it doesn’t seem right.”

Paul made it clear he’s still strongly opposed to the bill, both because of the process and the policy.

“I’m just not for a trillion-dollar grant program that keeps most of the Obamacare spending,” he said. “This is thrown together sort of in a slipshod way … A lot of this is about electoral politics.”

And he made it clear the basic structure of the bill is unacceptable to him.

“In my mind a compromise does not include block grants,” he said. “I just don’t think this is repeal. … I believe that it represents Republicans accepting a trillion dollars of Obamacare spending.”

He and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) are both hard noes on the bill and Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) is leaning no, enough to kill the bill, while Murkowski and a handful of other have expressed deep reservations.

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Notable Replies

  1. Avatar for ghost ghost says:

    Unseemly? Yeah, that’s one word for it…

  2. Avatar for erik_t erik_t says:

    Is it better to have craven slime like Yertle representing you in the US Senate, or a man of principles (whose principles are almost uniformly terrible)?

    Glad I don’t have to make that pick. Y’all enjoy them, Kentucky.

  3. Avatar for aiddon aiddon says:

    What a shitshow

  4. Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.
    Yeats 1919

    So the best of the GOP have a conscience and the worst of GOP want more death and distruction.

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