Rand Paul is ready to squeeze GOP senators on their $5T debt hike

He plans to offer just one amendment during the upcoming vote-a-rama.

Jennifer Scholtes 04/02/2025, 9:26pm ET

Sen. Rand Paul has a reputation for forcing his GOP colleagues to take tough votes, andhe’s already got a zinger in mind as the Senate prepares for another all-night “vote-a-rama” on Friday.

Before Senate Republicans can adopt their revamped budget framework,the Kentucky Republican plans to offer just one amendment: a proposal to substantially shrink the GOP’s current plan to raise the debt limit by $5 trillion under the party-line package they’re trying to clear this year to cut taxes, boost military budgets, ramp up border security spending and more.

Instead,Paul’s amendment would allow Republicans to clear a $500 billion increase to the U.S. borrowing limit.

Raising the debt limit by $500 billion would only buy Congress a few months before lawmakers would have to vote againto prevent the U.S. from defaulting on its more than $36 trillion national debt, whereas leadership’s current plan is designed to take the politically thorny issue off the table until after the midterms. And that’s Paul’s point.

“From a conservative point of view, the more we vote on the debt ceiling, the better, because it draws attention to it,” Paul, who has many times votes against raising or waiving the debt limit, said in a brief interview Wednesday night.

Enacting a debt limit increase that only lasts a few months also gives fiscal conservatives another leverage point to force deep spending cuts.

“I would like to see whether or not the promises of reduced spending materialize,” Paul said. “And we say to our leadership: ‘Okay, you’re promising to cut spending.If you cut spending, I’ll vote for another three-month increase in the debt ceiling. But if you don’t actually do what you’re promising, then maybe you don’t get a debt ceiling increase.’ So we’re going to use some leverage on it.”

While the amendment is unlikely to be adopted, Paul said he thinks some Democrats might vote in support. Democrats have been counting on Republicans having to negotiate with them over raising the debt ceiling, and extracting some policy concessions in exchange.

“It might be an interesting vote, whether or not people on the other side decide that another bite at the apple is a good idea,”he said.

Paul was the only Republican senator to vote against the last attempt at a budget framework the Senate adopted about six weeks ago, before House GOP leaders mustered the votes to advance a much broader plan to enact the “big, beautiful bill” President Donald Trump is seeking.

(The GOP in the house and senate are very unserious people, they have no intention of eliminating debt, that’s why 30 years of bad debt has to be eliminated by Trump.When PDJT gets the trillions coming in, the House and Senate should be limited on a budget with no increases for years to come. They will only create more debt as we are paying it off!)

https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/04/02/congress/rand-paul-is-ready-to-squeeze-gop-senators-on-their-5t-debt-hike-00267947

RFK Jr. staff to brief House panel on massive agency overhaul

The Health and Human Services secretary is under scrutiny for mass firings across the department. Ben Leonard 04/02/2025, 5:15pm ET

Health and Human Services staff will brief the House Energy and Commerce Committee next week in the wake of a massive overhaul of the agency which included significant layoffs, said a spokesperson for chair Brett Guthrie.

Guthrie, a Kentucky Republican, also spoke directly to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Tuesday about the controversial restructuring and personnel moves, the spokesperson added, andthe agency committed to a bipartisan briefing.

The move comes after the chair and ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee —Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-La.)(traitor and Trump hater) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), respectively — on Tuesday invited Kennedy to testify before their panel following the firing of 10,000 of the department’s 80,000 workers late Monday. The move impacted offices like the Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institutes of Health.

A spokesperson for HHS has not said whether Kennedy will accept the invitation, but House Energy and Commerce ranking member Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) and health subcommittee ranking member Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) in the letter Wednesday requested that Guthrie extend a similar offer for Kennedy to address their committee, as well, “to give him the opportunity to explain his plan to Congress.”

Republicans accused Democrats of playing politics with the letter and defended their plans for a staff briefing as the appropriate course of action at this time.

“It’s clear to us that the Democrats are using this as a partisan ploy,”said the Guthrie spokesperson, noting that Republicans had informed Democrats that they had asked HHS for a briefing before they sent out their request to the committee chair.

Pallone and DeGette, in their letter, pointed to Guthrie’s own words in calling for the hearing with Kennedy: During an unrelated committee event Tuesday where Democrats protested the agency-wide cuts, Guthrie said he agreed that oversight of HHS is important.

“We have to have the proper oversight to make sure the things that Congress directs the administration is in place,” Guthrie said at that time, while also adding that President Donald Trump campaigned on making government more efficient.

A spokesperson for Guthrie, however, said the chair did not commit to a hearing.

“A yet-to-be-scheduled staff briefing that Democrats may or may not be invited to doesn’t cut it and Chairman Guthrie knows it,” said a spokesperson for Energy and Commerce Democrats in a statement. “If Secretary Kennedy believes in what he’s doing, he should have the courage to defend it before Congress and the American people.”

https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/04/02/congress/energy-and-commerce-democrats-call-for-hearing-with-rfk-jr-after-major-hhs-layoffs-00267100

I'm getting to hate all of congress and senate, they are all snakes.

The following article outlines federal land data for all 50 states. An overview of federal land policy and how federal land is managed can be accessed here.

The federal government owns around 620 million acres of land (about 27 percent) of the 2.27 billion acres of land in the United States.Around 92 percent of federally owned acres are in 12 Western states.[1][2]

Four federal agencies—the U.S. National Park Service (NPS), U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), and U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) within the U.S. Department of the Interior, and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) in the U.S. Department of Agriculture—oversee roughly 95 percent, or 608 to 610 million acres, of federal land.[1][2]

HIGHLIGHTS

• Alaska had the most federal land (222.7 million acres)while Nevada had the greatest percentage of federal land within a state (80.1 percent).

• Connecticut and Iowa tied for the lowest percentage of federal land at 0.3 percent each.

Federal land by state

The table below summarizes the total acres and percentage of federal land in each state as of 2013 (the most recent year for which data is available).

Alaska had the most federal land (222.7 million acres) while Nevada had the greatest percentage of federal land within a state (80.1 percent). In contrast, Rhode Island and Connecticut had the fewest acres of federal land: 4,513 acres and 9,110 acres, respectively. Connecticut and Iowa tied for the lowest percentage of federal land at 0.3 percent each.[1]

https://ballotpedia.org/Federal_land_ownership_by_state

The hunters and fishers, outdoor people don't think the Government should sell any of it. They say people make a living off the land, but there's only 70,000 employed or small business's in the country; that sell what they get from the land, but they must have but they are not happy it's only 615 hundred 1000 acres.

So these people will deprive people of small homes or communities, because there are not enough housing for the country.