The Daily 202: Rand Paul’s short-lived shutdown is ending, but his warning about GOP deficit hypocrisy reverberates
Rand Paul’s short-lived shutdown is ending, but his warning about GOP deficit hypocrisy reverberates Paul: ‘If I’m responsible for drawing attention to the debt, so be it’ BY JAMES HOHMANN with Breanne Deppisch and Joanie Greve THE BIG IDEA: Republicans are all Keynesians now , but not Rand Paul. As he forced a brief government shutdown overnight to draw attention to his party’s hypocrisy on deficit spending , Kentucky’s junior senator was the personification of William F. Buckley’s definition of conservatism : standing athwart history, yelling stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it. “I ran for office because I was very critical of [Barack] Obama’s trillion-dollar deficits. Now we have Republicans hand-in-hand with Democrats offering us trillion-dollar deficits,” Paul said during a floor speech, as he predicted that “a day of reckoning” is coming. “I can’t ...