Nevertheless, it was Sen. Paul shot back that going further into debt doesn’t make America safe either.
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Remember how Trump kept attacking Paul in the first two debates, sometimes out of nowhere? But he started to make his mark when he jumped in to accuse Sen. “I thought I got more time”, Paul said.
It was a good line, well rehearsed, and it actually won him more than a little applause from the Republican audience.
Watch above, via Fox Business Network.
The US senator from Kentucky toured college campuses in the Twin Cities and Duluth, and he met with student supporters in Rochester ahead of Tuesday’s GOP presidential debate in Milwaukee. Rubio is a forceful debater, and he represents hawkish, mainstream Republican foreign policy thinking. I want a strong national defence, but I don’t want us to be bankrupt.
Trump and Paul, on the other hand, opposed a no-fly zone.
Rubio: …are you talking about the military, Rand? If you’re going to establish a no-fly zone, Paul said, then you better be ready to shoot down Russian planes and send our sons and daughters to fight another war in the Middle East. Are we ready for that? I am not happy about them flying over there. Past experience shows, however, that no one is really serious about cutting spending, they just like to talk about it. That is naive to the point of being something you might hear in junior high. Rand Paul hadn’t made much noise in these melees. “It doesn’t seem like he fits into that flawless narrative of Republican or Democrat”. “Bernie can only pay for your college by taking it from somebody else”.
As is often the case, Donald Trump sounded a different note. Jeb Bush got a passing grade when the consensus was he needed an A+.
Rubio defended his plan, ending with the statement: “You think defending this nation is expensive?”
Rand Paul probably won’t.
But part of the blame, too, lies with other Republicans who have willfully misrepresented Paul’s positions, of which Rubio is only the most recent example.
Senators Marco Rubio and Rand Paul clashed over the necessity of increasing the defense budget while arguing for a smaller government during the 4th Republican presidential debate on Tuesday. If you’re a profligate spender, you spend money in an unlimited fashion for the military, is that a conservative notion? The libertarian Cato Institute looks at that split and argues that “candidates leaning in a more libertarian direction will likely be benefited at the polls”.
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“Paul was not the only candidate to question his fellow Republicans” eagerness to get involved in Syria and Iraq, however.
