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.
