Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
WHS. Senator Ran Paul joining us from Washington. Senator Paul, Welcome.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Back, Terry, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
You notice I'm playing Rush music for you because you
were a fan in your college.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
There what of great Rush tribute.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
They're coming back with like a fifty something tour next
year with a new drummer obviously a friend of the guys.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
So well, that'll be interesting. It's always great to watch,
you know, senior citizens back in tour. You know, people
love to see that.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Well, some of them just can't give it up.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Tough stuff, had some great they had some great songs
in the day, and they were They turned a lot
of people onto iin Rand and vice versa. People who
knew of Iron Rand knew that Rush, you know, wrote
songs that had to do with their writings. And you know,
I think there was many a teenage boy that loved
the twenty one to twelve album and a lot of
(00:56):
their great tunes, Trees, something for Nothing, you.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Remember all that. Well, let's dive right in. Since you
brought up by and Rand is your libertarian leaning mindset
pleased by an Austere government shutdown. I mean, they're not
spending money at the same leave.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Well they are and they aren't. Basically, what happens during
a shutdown is they do quit paying some of their
employees for a while, but as soon as they reopen
it up, the first bill they always pass make sure
that everybody got paid when they weren't working. So in fact,
all of the unessential workers that are not in Washington,
that are out on the mall today or playing golf,
all of them will be paid for their back time
(01:34):
when the shutdowns in. So shutdown actually doesn't save any money.
You would think it would, but only in Washington can
you shut something down. And it's more expensive to be
shut down than be open.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
The law that was passed though in twenty nineteen by
the Trump administration, or I mean the one that the
order perhaps it was that said there's back pay. Aren't
they re examining that now to try to look for
ways out of it.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
Yeah, they say that, but ends up passing it. When
they pass the reopening usually they stick a clause or
a phrase into the reopening language. So right now they're
trying to vote on a cr The CRT continues the
Biden spending levels and will lead to about two trillion
dollars deficit. When that comes up again, the Democrats agree
to vote for it. One of the things they'll negotiate
(02:18):
for is that all the workers get back pay.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Okay, your words here from Twitter. No real cuts, no
debt reduction. I'm talking about the cr It's the same
old Washington game, borrowing more, ignoring fiscal responsibility. We need
to stop the spending spree and get government under control.
So you're not a fan of the big beautiful bill,
So how would you do it if you were in charge?
Senator Paul Well.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
I introduced the Penny Plan budget about two weeks ago,
and I've done that each year for the last several years.
The reason I'm allowed to introduce it, and why one
senator gets to introduced his own budget, is when neither
party introduces a budget, there's a loophole that says, if
both parties have been so derelict in their duty is
to not introduce a budget, any senator can. So I've
(03:03):
taken advantage of that. Most years Republicans and the Democrats
failed to introduce a budget. They did this year, so
I introduced my own, and the paint Plan budget basically
takes the approach of across the board spending restraint, so
instead of eliminating one hundred percent of anything, we eliminate
what it would take to balance a budget in five years.
The reason we chose five years is the Balance Budget
(03:25):
Amendment to the Constitution that we voted on in recent
times basically allowed for five years to come to balance.
And as you know me, I'm such a moderate, I
figure we won't do it in one year. We'll just
do it in five years because that's very modest. And
it takes about a six percent cut across the board
and everything that's on budget, so that's everything but social security.
(03:45):
But I think you could do it and really deliver
the same amount of services. I think there's six percent
waste involved in government spending across the board.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
So if you can knock off that six percent, that
would get it right, get the ship righted in five
years unless there's some unforeseen crisis.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
Yeah. And in fact, even the balance Budget Amendment that
I support to the Constitution as an exception for a
declared war. But when we wrote the amendment, we put
in declared war because we didn't want them to say
blowing up a boat off of Venezuela as a war. Therefore,
we're going to run a deficit to pay for blowing
up speed votes. But no, so it had to be
(04:23):
a declared war to have an exemption to it. But
we're still a ways away from this. I got thirty
six votes for my budget, which is a high water mark.
That's the most I've gotten. But it's all Republican votes,
and then there's about sixteen Republican knows to my budget,
and then all the Democrats are opposed. And I think
it is useful a lot of times the debate, like
right now, everybody says it's either for keeping the government
(04:44):
open or setting it down. It really isn't. That's not
the debate. The debate is over what level of spending,
what level of debt do you think it's okay to carry.
So the Republican plan the spending will incur about a
two trillion dollar debt this year, and the Democrats spending
would incur three trillion dollar debt. And I guess my
reason for opposing both is that I don't think we
should be adding more debt. I'll compromise by adding a
(05:06):
little less than last year. So we did two trillion
last year. If you told me we'd do one trillion
this year. As much as it would give me heartburn,
I might vote to borrow a trillion to keep the
government open. I'm just not going to vote to borrow
two trillion because I think it's leading us to a
path of ruin.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Yeah, well, that's an improvement anyway, if it goes down
to it true. And let's go back to this, the
drone strikes on suspected drug cartel boats. You clearly are
not a fan of.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
This.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Is this murder before jury trial? I mean, how do
you see this?
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Well, we interdict boats all the time. That's the first
thing that's important. So the Coastguard interdicts hundreds of boats
each year and they say about seventy five percent of
them have drugs on board. So what that tells me
is they're not always certain. And that's why we yell
through a bullhorn. We yell halt, you will be boarded.
If they halt and they let them board, everything's fine.
If they try to run, they can be deterred with arms.
(06:00):
If they fire at the coastguard, they can be killed.
That's the rules of engagement has been for a long time.
But if twenty five percent of the time the Coastguard
boards a boat there's no drugs. Would we want to
change the policy to, hey, we're going to blow you
to smither Rings with a missile because you look like
you're probably a drug dealer. And realize these attacks are
(06:21):
twenty seven hundred miles away from the US, right off
the coast of Venezuela. And my question is, if you
know they're guilty, and you know they're a member of
a gang, what are their names? So they can't produce
the names of these people, so they don't know who
these people are. And even when we do everything right
in our country, you know, twenty thousand people are murdered
every year, and if one of my loved ones, the
(06:43):
first thing I'd want to do is shoot them. But
in the end, calmer minds prevail and we have courts.
But you know that sometimes we convict somebody of murder
who actually didn't do it, or sometimes the jury says
they didn't do it. So really, if we don't have
any kind of safeguard, a kind of trial for people,
any kind of process, it really could lead to a lawlessness,
(07:05):
basically just blowing people's boats up. And I think as
much as people hate the drugs coming in and I do,
and I hate the test. I know kids who have
doted this. We can't just, I think, adopt a code
where we just blow up people we think might be
drug dealers.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
As long as we're talking about crime and punishments. The
Kentucky Parole Board is facing a lot of calls for
people to step down now after releasing this man, Ronald Exantis,
on good behavior. He's been in for ten years. He
killed a six year old named Logan Tipton ten years
ago and he's already getting out. And so how do
(07:42):
you feel about the calls for this review. I know
you were big on restoring voting rights for felons and
all that business, but this is a serious matter of violence.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
I can't Yeah, I cannot contain my anger and disapployment
at this. While I have been for some legiency for
teenage Jersey to costs smoking pot people who commit murder,
I'm not for leniency. I'm for tougher sentencing. And in fact,
there was a tougher sentencing bill that was passed I
think last year, and I think it was supposed to
(08:10):
correct problems like this where people like this wouldn't be
eligible for parole. So part of the problem might be
the prole board, but part of the problem might be
the law. If the law says you can kill somebody,
get twenty years and be eligible for parole in ten
that's a problem with the law. And so the people
who write these laws say, you need parole to induce
good behavior. Yeah, but we also need to punish people
(08:33):
and keep them away from society. I would say twenty
years is a minimum for this guy. I would have
given this guy life, So I don't know how he
gets out in ten years, and I think it's a
huge problem. I haven't looked into it enough to know
if the board could have voted the other way or
how it works with that. But the law ought to
be changed too, and we're going to look into whether
(08:53):
the law changed last year by the state legislature might
have prevented this from happening. But maybe this guy's sentence
before the law was passed last year.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
We're speaking with Senator Ran Paul. You're going to be
the senior senator here in Kentucky after next year. Does
this mean that the the Kentucky Republican Party then hands
you the keys to the statewide machine that really, Mitch
McConnell has been the builder over all these decades, or
(09:23):
is your party relationship maybe have some fractures because of
your occasional straying from the party line.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
I heard there was a special beachside condo and a car,
but that could be wrong. I could be wrong on that. Now.
I don't think it means a lot. People talk about
being a senior senator and it means something symbolically, but
every senator has the same boat, junior or senior. I
do want influence not only the party in Kentucky, but
the party nationally. And the way I try to influence
(09:52):
is that I think what made America great is capitalism
and trade, and we can't get away from that. And
if we think trade is a bad thing, being ripped
off by trading with people, it's a huge economic fallacy
and will lead to less prosperity in our country. So
I want to be a voice for that, a voice
for continuing to believe in low taxes, not high taxes.
(10:12):
That means lower tariffs, not higher tariffs. And also someone
who just believes that the business that is creating these
jobs around here needs to be largely left alone. We
need to keep government out of the way of business,
to let the jobs be created and let the creation
of the marketplace take place.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
The Canadian prime ministers here today. I was in Washington
and he looked like a puppy essentially. I mean he
was complimenting Donald Trump. We heard all the other fraction
or friction rather from the tariffs and so forth. So
it looks like some of these policies have moved in
the right direction. I know you're opposed to them, but
do you feel like maybe there is some wisdom behind
(10:54):
the tariff policies.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
Well, I guess it depends on who you are. If
you sell liquor, if you're sell bourbon. The amount of
liquor being sold to Canada is down eighty five percent.
I mean this is a huge amount. I think second
quarter of last year we sold sixty three million dollars worth.
This quarter we sold nine million dollars worth. So that's
a real decrease and is hurting our bourbon. People are
(11:18):
having a herding. If you look at our farmers, people
are talking about farm again. The prices are down. We've
reduced markets and this year China bought zero not a
little bit, but they've bought zero soybean. They've gone to
Brazil and now they're going to Argentina. So the farmers
are in dire straits because of tariffs. The bourbon industries
in dire states because of tariffs. If you talk to
(11:39):
our cargo transplant planes in those companies, all of their
business is down. I spoke to a chemical company today
that an automobile company whose business is down and worried
about tariffs. So I'm not hearing a lot good from
the business community about the tariffs. All I hear is
really the threat tariffs have to our prosperity.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Okay, last thing for you here, of you've did a
tour recently with Congressman Thomas Massey, who's obviously a thorn
in President Trump's side, but you've voted on the other
side with the other side a few times too. Why
are you still on friendly terms with President Trump?
Speaker 2 (12:14):
You know, I still like Trump. I think President Trump's
the best president of my lifetime. That even rivals Ronald Reagan.
There's some things I don't like, you know, I disagree
with the tariff policy. I don't like to have a
suspending and so I have to keep advocating for the
things that I believe in and the things I ran on,
but it doesn't mean I've been adversary of the president.
I played golf with him a month ago. But I'm
(12:35):
also a big fan of Thomas Massey. I think he
is in the most fiscally conservative member of the House.
I think in many ways he's the conscience of the House.
And I think if you were to be defeated, what
we would have as a political party that just follows
Locke step one person, but isn't an individuals thinking. And
(12:57):
I don't think people want a rubber stamp. I think
people want to a little bit more of a dynamic
back and forth, even in the Republican Party, to determine
what's the most conservative action.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Senator ran Paul appreciate the time as always, Thanks Jaran
that Senator ran Paul live from Washington.