Paul Suggests Reopening Government for a Week to Negotiate

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) this morning suggested a one-week clean continuing resolution so that Congress can negotiate over the Obamacare provisions.

“One suggestion is that when we disagree, historically, we’ve gone to conference committee. You have Republicans in the House who want to alter or compromise on Obamacare. You have Senate Democrats unwilling to. So if you have a disagreement, you come together with equal number of Republicans, equal number of Democrats, and you find a compromise,” Paul said this morning on CNN.

Given Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) unwillingness to go to conference, Paul then suggested “we could pass a very short term, maybe not six weeks but what about one week so we can negotiate over a week.”

“I think a continuing bill to keep the government open while we negotiate is a good idea. I do agree that negotiating with the government closed probably to them appears like strong-arm tactics. So if we keep the government open, but I think it needs to be short-term enough that we are having an active negotiation, that we don’t just say, oh, we’re going to fund it for three months or two months and come back. I think if we did it for a week or two, I think we could still continue to negotiate, have a conference committee and really I think the American people do want us to work this out,” he continued.

Paul added “the interesting thing about this process is that we’ve offered a lot of different compromises.”

“Our first position really wasn’t so much a compromise. We don’t want Obamacare. We think it’s a bad idea and going to hurt people. So we offered to get rid of it completely,” he said. “But that didn’t pass and so we offered a compromise to say, look, you’ve been delaying other parts of it, why don’t we delay the whole thing for a year? That, I think, is a compromise position. That was rejected. We then offered to delay only the individual mandate. The president has unilaterally done it with the employer mandate. That’s another compromise that’s been rejected. Now we’re offering also a clean CR for a week or two. But then my understanding is that Senator Reid has rejected that out of hand as well.”

“…And while I don’t want to shut down government and I would be for short-term solutions to keep it open, I think we do sometimes have to make a stand and say enough’s enough. We’re spending our kids’ future and we can’t keep doing it this way.”