#Rand Paul slams McConnell’s ‘outrageous’ support for standalone foreign aid bill

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) slammed Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) Friday what he called his “outrageous” support for the Plan B foreign aid bill proposed after striping out border security provisions.

He specifically knocked his Senate colleagues for focusing on providing additional aid to Ukraine and Israel amid their ongoing wars, instead of addressing the border crisis.

“It’s criminal neglect for Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, and Joe Biden to get together to send $100 billion overseas to fix someone else’s border before addressing our border,” Paul said Friday in an interview with Fox Business’s Larry Kudlow, calling the idea “outrageous.”

Paul hit back on Biden’s comments that not providing aid to Ukraine was “neglect,” saying it is reprehensible to negotiate a deal to fund foreign government’s militaries without resolving the issue of the U.S.-Mexico border.  

In a 64-19 vote Friday evening, the Senate proceeded with the bill whose border provisions were stripped by Schumer (D-N.Y.) after only a handful of GOP senators voted for the original bipartisan package. 

Paul pledged to delay votes on a $95.3 billion bill Friday after branding the legislation “rotten.” In response, Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) called him a “peckerhead” for forcing colleagues to through the procedural steps Friday night and into the Super Bowl weekend in order to pass the funding package. 

“We have an emergency, we have an invasion,” Paul said in Friday’s interview, highlighted by Mediaite. “We have 700,000 people who came across in the last two months, and they’re willing just to punt on that. You know, they put forward a fake proposal, it wasn’t any good. We shot it down.”

“But that doesn’t mean we’re ready to give up on it. Many of us want to fight,” he argued. “Thirty-two of us out of 48, three-fourths of us, said we wanted to keep fighting, and wanted to actually fix the border before we ship $100 billion of our money overseas.”

The collapsed bipartisan border security deal, which took months to negotiate, was partially forged by Paul’s conference colleague, Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.).