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Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and fellow Republicans walked out of a tense assembly of the Homeland Safety Committee through the markup of the Hearth Grants and Security Act following an alternate with the panel’s chairman, Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.).
Paul expressed his frustration with Peters utilizing secondary amendments to primarily nullify his amendments to the invoice that reauthorizes the U.S. Hearth Administration, the Help to Firefighters (AFG) Grants Program, and the Staffing for Satisfactory Hearth and Emergency Response (SAFER) Grant Program.
The Kentucky Republican, who turned the rating member after reasonable Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) retired final 12 months, blasted Peters, stating, “This is the first time we’ve had a hearing since I’ve been here that I know of that we’ve gotten second degree amendments on every one of our amendments.”
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Peters utilized extra amendments to counter these introduced by Paul, together with one modification that will have rendered hearth departments ineligible for federal grants in the event that they terminated workers for not receiving the Covid-19 vaccine, Mediaite reported.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Paul protested at one level as Peters continued to undermine his amendments. “This is legislative legerdemain to obscure the fact that you’re trying to not vote directly on this.”
“If this is the way you’re going to run the committee, I would suggest that Republicans leave. I don’t see why we should stick around if you’re going to make up the rules,” Paul railed at one level.
That led Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) to intervene. “We all take a couple minutes, lower the temperature, just figure out the procedure,” she mentioned, including: “There’s no need for us to turn this committee hearing into a partisan, ugly place like we’ve seen in other committees.”
Ultimately, Paul did depart the assembly whereas GOP Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and James Lankford of Oklahoma remained and voted in opposition to Peters’ amendments. However they handed anyway, and the invoice was voted out of committee.
The Hill famous that “the acrimonious scene was a departure from how the Homeland Security Committee operated in 2021 and 2022 when Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) served as the panel’s ranking member. In the recent past, Democrats on the committee have sometimes sat on the Republican side of the dais and vice versa to promote a sense bipartisan camaraderie.”
Later, Peters instructed reporters: “I look forward to working with Sen. Paul and hopefully we can find common ground to go forward. Some of the amendments he offered were not germane to the substance of the bill that we were dealing with.”
In December, Paul issued a brutal assertion to retiring Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s lead immunologist, after he declared that he had no regrets about how he dealt with the pandemic.
“Likely there is no public figure, or public health figure, that has made a greater error in judgment than Dr. Fauci. The error in judgment was to fund gain-of-function research in a totalitarian country — fund research that allowed them to create super viruses that, in all likelihood, accidentally leaked into the public and caused seven million people to die,” mentioned Paul, who regularly clashed with Fauci throughout Senate oversight hearings into Fauci’s responses and proposals concerning the pandemic.
“Think about it. This is right up there with decisions, some of them malevolent or military, to kill millions of people,” Paul mentioned. “This is accidental, but it goes to judgment.”
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“Talk about errors. You think he might apologize to the world for funding research that allowed superviruses to be created in a lab – a lab that was not properly outfitted for safety, that people were already reporting was dangerous – to support that kind of research, and then to look the other way and say, ‘Nothing to see here,’ and to cover it up,” Paul famous.
“For the last two years, he’s been covering his tracks, but we’ve caught him red-handed, and he won’t get away,” the GOP senator added.
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