Kentucky Senator and GOP presidential candidate Rand Paul argued that TPA is giving the president power on trade bills, some of which he says seem like “more of an outline of the bill” on Tuesday’s broadcast of “The Kuhner Report” on Boston’s WRKO.
Rand, before the vote took place, stated, “I’ve been consistently against TPA and have voted against it from the beginning. I think that giving more authority to the president is precisely what we don’t need to be doing. One of my biggest complaints, and I’ve said this all around the country as I’ve spoken out, is that the worst thing that the president has done is his collapse of the separation of powers. And we’ve had too much power transferred to the presidency, not just this president, but really for 100 years, probably from Woodrow Wilson on, we’ve allowed too much power to accumulate with the presidency. And I’m not going to voluntarily give him more power.”
He continued that while he is generally for trade, “I don’t like the fact that they made this classified. I went and read it, and we can’t really fully understand it unless everybody’s able to read it and we’re able to cross-reference it, and I’m concerned about them making it classified, I don’t like that at all. And so I’ve voted against giving the president any kind of special authority where we can’t amend the bill. And I don’t feel like the bill’s even complete, the trade bill, so I can’t tell you absolutely on the trade bill, but we need to know more about it. What I read seemed to be more of an outline of the bill, and not the actual meat and guts of the bill. So, I’m very concerned about giving the president power about something I don’t fully have all the information on.”
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