We have a couple of videos for you in this post. They’re from the Senate this week, and they’re from Sen. Rand Paul who is going off on the idiotic, atrocious, flagrantly irresponsible and unforgivable omnibus spending bill that the Republican leadership is collaborating with Chuck Schumer and the Democrats to force through.

Video #1 comes from the Senate floor on Monday, and it was a brilliant speech skewering the federal government for its fiscal incontinence and terrible management practices – noting that most European countries manage to balance their budgets but we can’t, and castigating the GOP establishment as being just as bad as the Democrats. He says you have two sides of the same bad coin – welfare and warfare. The Democrats are all about the welfare industrial complex and the Republicans are about the military industrial complex, and the American people get crushed in the middle through runaway inflation.

And Video #2 comes from a press conference Monday that several conservative members of the Senate called to trash the omnibus.

The first speaker is Mike Braun from Indiana, and then it’s Paul next and Ron Johnson following thereafter. Stick around for Mike Lee’s segment of the video as well, because it’s really good.

The problem is it’s only a few opponents of the omnibus at that press conference. There should have been 40 who supported a filibuster.

Instead, cloture passed on a 70-25 vote.

It’s a humiliating disaster for the Republican Party and its voters are rightly demoralized. In fact, there is no reason to support any GOP senator who votes for any iteration of this bill.

Or who supports or supported Mitch McConnell as the party’s leader in the Senate.

Mollie Hemingway at the Federalist had a tremendous column about McConnell and his effect on the GOP as a whole…

The American people voted for Republicans to take over control of the House of Representatives, and House Republicans had begged McConnell to push for a smaller, short-term bill to keep the government funded while also giving them a rare opportunity to weigh in on Biden’s policy goals. McConnell allies dismissed House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy and other House members who tried to persuade Republican senators not to support Democrats’ spending frenzy.

Budgets are policy documents, and the only leverage Republicans have is to wait a few weeks for when they will have a much stronger hand to weigh in on every issue that matters. By ramming through the $1.7 trillion package during the lame-duck session, Republicans will have significantly less ability over the next year to fight against Democrats’ destruction of rule of law in the Department of Justice, the failure to protect American borders, the destruction of the military, and Democrat collusion with Big Tech to suppress conservatives and their ideas.

The spending bill McConnell asserted was good for all of his priorities rewards the FBI with brand new headquarters and ups the funding for the DOJ to enable it to go after even more of its political opponents while protecting its political allies.

It’s perhaps worth remembering that during the 2020 Georgia runoff campaign, McConnell blocked efforts to increase funding for Americans who had their businesses and jobs shut down by government mandate during the response to Covid-19. Spending is not a problem for him, so long as the right people receive the funds.

Republicans Need a Leader Who Shares Their Goals

What support McConnell has from Republicans largely comes from doing his job well when it comes to judicial nominations. I myself co-wrote a book on the topic. He is rightly praised for his work in getting conservative judges and justices confirmed and for stopping one liberal judicial nominee, Merrick Garland. It is not praiseworthy, however, that he encouraged President Trump to nominate Garland as attorney general and voted to confirm him when President Biden did nominate him.

It is noteworthy that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has matched McConnell’s record on judges, and with far less fanfare from his allies. Perhaps Democrats demand more of their leaders than competence at only a few aspects of their job. That Schumer is capable of doing what McConnell has done shows it’s not a particularly unique skill set.

McConnell allies also like to say McConnell is good at stopping Democrat legislation. Indeed, McConnell did contribute to what few successes there were in the last two years, such as stopping the poorly named Equality Act. Certainly, he played small ball well enough to keep Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona from voting to get rid of the filibuster. Again, whatever frustration Republican voters have with McConnell should not keep them from acknowledging these limited successes.

However, Republican voters are desperately concerned about the country and are looking for bold and persuasive leadership instead of comfort with a few small, intermittent successes. They also seek leaders who don’t hate them. Frustration with McConnell’s well-known and long-established disdain for Republican voters is becoming a serious problem.

It’s good to see Paul so openly attacking the GOP leadership, which amounts to his attacking McConnell, his fellow Kentuckian, for this disaster. My suggestion is that a petition be circulated with Republican voters vowing not to support the party in Senate elections ever again until McConnell is replaced as the caucus leader.

As Hemingway notes, the GOP isn’t worthy of having a Senate majority with the timid and submissive McConnell caucus as its active ingredient.