The Washington Examiner posted an article today with the following headline, “Republicans join Democrats to kill Rand Paul’s fiscally responsible Pennies Plan because no one cares about the debt crisis.”
As of today, the national debt of America is approximately 22 trillion dollars. That’s a lot of debt for our children and grandchildren to be saddled with.
The article reports:
That was a nice decade of Republicans pretending to care about our $22 trillion national debt and annual multitrillion-dollar deficit. But as of Monday, we can safely say the Tea Party is over.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., introduced about as reasonable an attempt to rein in our exploding deficit with his Pennies Plan, which would cut 2% from on-budget spending per year for the next five years. Additionally, Paul’s plan would expressly protect Social Security, include instructions to make the individual income tax reforms passed by President Trump permanent, and expand access to Health Savings Accounts.
It’s a modest but tangible step in the right direction. It wouldn’t solve our debt crisis, but it would ameliorate it somewhat. So naturally, a large bipartisan majority voted to block it from the Senate floor.
Just 22 Republicans proved themselves to be great American patriots. Sixty-nine senators, including a whopping 25 Republicans, voted not to bring the bill to a final vote.
What are we voting those 25 Republicans into the Senate for? Conservatives tell me that Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., is the next big thing. But while he’s found the time to nearly derail Trump’s exceptional judicial agenda and threaten to go full-big-government on private social media companies, he refused to bring the Pennies Plan for as much as a floor vote.
It is time for those who formed the Tea Party Movement in 2009 to rename and rebrand their movement and work to shrink the cost of government. Increasing debt is not a workable financial model. It is time to elect legislators who will actually keep their promise to shrink government–not grow it. There is something in the water in Washington that causes people who run as conservatives to forget who put them in office. We need to keep voting them out of office until we find someone who knows how to keep his promises.