One of the Senate GOP’s biggest critics of President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” won’t rule out coming around on the sweeping domestic policy package.
But Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) told NBC’s Kristen Welker on Sunday that he would need the White House to make major modifications to the bill’s planned $5 trillion debt ceiling hike to garner his support.
“Congress is awful with money, and so you should give them a more restricted credit line, not an expansive one,” he said on “Meet the Press.” “Yes, the debt ceiling has to go up, but what I’ve said is it ought to go up three months at a time and then we should have a renewed debate about the debt. We shouldn’t put it up $5 trillion and wait two years, go through another election cycle and be almost toward the end of the Trump administration and say, ‘Oh, whoops, we’ve added a bunch of debt.'”
Trump’s megabill passed the House by just a single vote in May, landing in a Senate Republican caucus with competing priorities and a tricky political landscape. But three of the Senate GOP’s most skeptical deficit hawks — Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, Utah Sen. Mike Lee and Florida Sen. Rick Scott — have signaled they could eventually lend their support to the bill.
Gaining Paul’s approval could prove far more costly for appropriators.
“Separate out the debt ceiling and have a separate vote on it,” Paul told Welker. “And I won’t be the deciding vote on this. This is what I tell my supporters. If I am the deciding vote, they’ll negotiate. If I’m not, they won’t. So far they’ve been sending their attack dogs after me, and that’s not a great persuasion technique.”