Interview with Senator Rand Paul

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – Check out Mike’s exclusive interview with Senator Rand Paul right here! Senator Paul discusses his bill to stop foreign aid to Egypt, ending foreign aid in general, INTERPOL arresting American citizens, and several other topics. Also, find out what Ron and Rand had to say about Mike while they were having dinner last night. Be sure and read the transcript!

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Back to the Dude Maker Hotline, our friend, the senator from the great State of Kentucky, son of Ron Paul who made a guest appearance yesterday on this program, Rand Paul is with us this morning.  Rand, good to hear from you again, my friend.  How are you?

Senator Rand Paul:  Good.  Good morning, Mike.  In fact, I had dinner with my dad last night and he said, “I was on the Mike Church Show just yesterday.”

Mike:  I’m glad to hear that I’m in the Family Paul conversation.

Senator Paul:  He said, “Yeah, Mike put on this quote from this senator from Kentucky and I had to respond to it.”

Mike:  You know what I played?  I played your great speech on conscripting doctors in healthcare.  That’s what I played for him.

Senator Paul:  He said he agreed with almost all of it.  That was good.  That was entertaining.

Mike:  Does he agree with you about Egypt?  Can you explain to the listeners what it is that your amendment — I didn’t get the bill that you’re trying to attach the amendment to.  Maybe you can flesh it out.  What is at issue with foreign aid to Egypt?  What is at stake here?  What is your amendment attached to?

Senator Paul:  Overall, I just think foreign aid is a bad idea.  $30 billion a year sent to other countries, we’re borrowing 40 cents on the dollar, so I think it’s a bad idea.  With Egypt, I think it’s an insulting idea.  Egypt had about 19 American citizens, these were pro-democracy workers over there, and they were holding them for trial.  They weren’t letting them leave the country.  About three months ago, I had an amendment that said they don’t get their aid until they release our citizens.  They did release our citizens.  Hillary Clinton released their aid.  I wrote a letter to her asking her not to because they were still going on with the prosecution.

Then it gets worse.  This week we find out that Egypt has asked INTERPOL, the international police agency, to issue international warrants for the arrest of Americans and to extradite them to Egypt.  It’s unlikely that the U.S. would actually allow this to happen, but interestingly, the President, in December of this year, wrote an executive order.  His executive order says that INTERPOL has diplomatic immunity.

They cannot be prosecuted in the United States.  There very well could be INTERPOL agents in the United States right now looking for these Americans to take them back to Egypt.  I think that isn’t consistent with us our making our own laws or our own sovereignty.

So I had an amendment to the post office bill.  Believe it or not, they told me that Egypt was not relevant to the post office bill.  I decided not to take that lying down.  I explained to them that the post office was losing $4 billion a year and we were spending $2 billion in Egypt.  A lot of my mail, I think, winds up in Egypt.  I told them money is money and if we save the $2 billion overseas, maybe that’ll help you with your post office.

Mike:  I think that’s a great point to make.  What I took away from watching the video on YouTube of your explanation of that on the floor of the Senate, Rand is starting to look too much like a politician.  You looked very statesman-like.  I marveled at, and it must just be a family trait and a family talent, but I marveled at the way you presented it to your colleagues.  You didn’t say, “We ought to cut out all foreign aid and the Constitution says . . ..”  What you said was this just doesn’t make any sense.  We shouldn’t be doing this.  We can’t allow our citizens to be arrested by a foreign entity on our soil, can we?

Senator Paul:  Here’s the thing, INTERPOL is already doing this in other countries.  Saudi Arabia did not like one of their journalists blaspheming or saying something they didn’t like about Mohammed, so they had him arrested in Malaysia.  INTERPOL actually arrested and has taken this journalist to Saudi Arabia.

He now faces the death penalty for apostasy.  We don’t want an international police agency coming into our country and arresting people for religious or politically trumped up charges.  The fact that President Obama has given INTERPOL diplomatic immunity, I think, is going in the wrong direction.  We’re going to keep talking about it until we get some comments from the administration.

Mike:  Is it fair to say, Rand, that the United States, the U.S. Constitution, does not confer a treaty, this sounds like a treaty to me, does not confer explicit and exclusive treaty-making power on the executive, that he would have to have done that with the advice and consent of you in the Senate?

Senator Paul:  You would think so.  I think what the problem is with most executive orders is that the President is usurping power that never was intended to be solely his power and we’ve let it happen.  I think this particular executive order is 13524.  I’m assuming that means there’s been 13,000 previous executive orders.  They do pretty dramatic things.  I really don’t think our founders ever thought that one person would be writing executive orders that are so sweeping.

Mike:  Senator Rand Paul from Kentucky is on the Dude Maker Hotline.  Rand, I want to run some numbers by you and get your comment on them.  $868,000, this is what the GSA is alleged to have squandered on their movie Hangover Part III in Las Vegas, $868,000.  If we run the numbers, what we will discover is that is one-ten thousandth of one percent of one-half of this year’s projected budget deficit.

That’s just the deficit number.  I have an even better number for you.  Let’s put this into scale.  If you take the $868,000 and you take the amount of money that the United States borrows on a daily basis and you do the math, what you will find is that what was squandered by the GSA equates to 16.6 seconds of the daily borrowing, now this is in addition to what is confiscated in taxes, 16.6 seconds’ worth of daily borrowing of the general government.  Would you say we’re a little out of scale?

Senator Paul:  Absolutely.  The thing is, we should be angered by this and we should do something about it, but at the same time, we should also be virtually overwhelmed by the enormity of the debt.  We’re borrowing $50,000 every second now.  If we don’t stop this onslaught, I really feel the deficit situation and crisis will lead to a calamity in this country.  Up here, it still blindly goes on.  Everybody just goes on their merry way and they still ask for more money and more programs.

Nobody is willing to touch entitlements.  Entitlements, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are 60, 65 percent of the budget.  They call it mandatory spending and no one is willing to touch it.  They are completely fearful.  I think they basically abdicate their duty up here.  They abdicate their role.  Heck, they don’t even pass a budget.  The Democrats up here have not passed a budget in three years.  That’s directly against the law.  We’re supposed to have a budget every year.

Mike:  Just staying on the subject of budget, you had a proposal, you had three sponsors, I believe.  Did it get anywhere, your budget proposal?  How much did you say, you and Senator DeMint and Senator Lee, the cosponsors at the time I spoke with you two months ago, how far did the budget get and how much were you gentlemen attempting to try to shave off one year of expenses?

Senator Paul:  Our budget balances in five years.  We’re going to get a vote on it.  Probably within the next two weeks, there will be a vote in the Senate on my budget.  It’s a privileged resolution, so it has to be voted on.  That’s one nice thing about budgets.  The Democrats won’t present it.  Last year I presented a five-year balanced budget and we got seven votes.  Some people were disappointed and they said, “You only got seven votes.”  I said, “Heck, I got seven more than the President got.”  The President got zero.

Ours cuts a significant amount.  I‘m not sure I can give you the exact amount, but it balances within five years.  I think over ten years, it actually returns $2 trillion in surplus over ten years.  Over five years, it balances.  To do that, you have to cut significant amounts.  We cut four departments.  We cut Energy, Commerce, Education and HUD.  That’s the way you can do it and not so dramatically cut Medicare and Social Security.  We reform them, but we don’t necessarily cut them.  We change them, we raise the age gradually and we means test the benefits to fix the entitlement programs.

Mike:  Is there a chance that you’ll exceed the seven votes this time?  Do you have more colleagues on your side?

Senator Paul:  Actually, I think we will.  I think we could get 15 or 20.  Some of it depends on how many alternatives are out there.  Ryan’s budget will also be presented on our side.  The problem I have, and I think he’s trying to do the right thing, but his budget doesn’t balance for 28 years.  That really shouldn’t be the Republican message.  That shouldn’t even be the compromise message.  We’ve got to do better than that.  I don’t know that we have 28 years to keep adding trillions of dollars in debt.  I think it needs to be — his doesn’t have entitlement reform — his doesn’t start for ten years.  I’m not sure we have that much time.

End Mike Church Show Transcript