Sen. Rand Paul says he supports the current chaos on Capitol Hill, telling
Time magazine the growing movement of grassroots conservatives in the House has been ignored by the Republican establishment.
"People want to marginalize these 30 or 40 as crazy right-wing people, but they probably represent the true feeling of the grassroots as much as — or more than — those who have been there for a long time," Paul, a Kentucky Republican, said of some of his fellow lawmakers.
"The longer that you are there, the less reflective of the people and more reflective of inertia."
Paul, who is running for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, told Time's Philip Elliott the 40-member Freedom Caucus — which helped seal the resignation of House Speaker John Boehner and stopped his presumed successor Rep. Kevin McCarthy from taking the job — is frustrated.
"We took over the House. We took over the Senate. And nothing has changed. People see it as an abdication of leadership, and so they're ready for new leadership," Paul said.
"The 40 Congressmen are, I think, reflective actually of the greater will of the party."
He acknowledged that the hunt for a new House Speaker is a tough one.
"The things the Speaker will ask them to do this fall are all things that we as conservatives object to: they're going to raise the debt ceiling and they are going to pass a spending bill that doesn't reform spending and actually allow spending to continue and debt formation to continue," Paul said.
"The 40 conservatives in the House will vote against raising the debt ceiling and they will vote against the continuing resolution. And I'm with them."
"You have to be willing to have an impasse. You have to be willing to stand up and people have to believe that you will continue to have an impasse in order to have leverage. We've always announced preemptively that we're not going to do that, and so we've had no leverage. We control Congress but the President gets whatever he wants."
Paul said of the ongoing specter of a government shutdown, which the GOP triggered in 2013 and could again later this year, "As much as I don't advocate shutting down as a goal in and of itself, but when it did shut down, we won bigger than in the next election."
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