Rand Paul Accuses Fellow Republican Mitch McConnell of ‘Criminal Neglect’ on the Border

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) accused Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) of “criminal neglect” for emphasizing the need for aid to Ukraine, allegedly at the expense of a secure U.S. southern border.

Paul appeared with Fox Business Network’s Larry Kudlow on Friday where he reacted to a soundbite from President Joe Biden on the southern border with Mexico. Biden said:

The failure of the United States Congress, if it occurs, not to support Ukraine is close to criminal neglect. It is outrageous.

Paul then flipped the script on the president saying, “It’s criminal neglect for Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, and Joe Biden to get together to send $100 billion overseas to fix someone else’s border before addressing our border.” Paul continued:

We have an emergency, we have an invasion. We have 700,000 people who came across in the last two months, and they’re willing just to punt on that. You know, they put forward a fake proposal, it wasn’t any good. We shot it down. But that doesn’t mean we’re ready to give up on it. Many of us want to fight. Thirty-two of us out of 48, three-fourths of us, said we wanted to keep fighting, and wanted to actually fix the border before we ship $100 billion of our money overseas.

I meet no one in Kentucky, no conservatives across the land for this, and the leadership of the Senate under Mitch McConnell is more concerned with sending your money to Ukraine than they are with the invasion of the southern border, and I’ve had enough. I’m going to do everything in my power to slow down and stop this, and I told them they can vote when hell freezes over because, frankly, this isn’t in the best interest of our country, and the money has to be borrowed. We don’t have $100 billion sitting around.

The “fake proposal” Paul referred to was a bipartisan border bill hammered out in part by Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) that died in the Senate. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said it would be “dead on arrival” in the House after former President Donald Trump urged Republicans to vote against it.

Paul said borrowing money for Ukraine, “makes us weaker, it’s bad for the country. Mitch McConnell, Joe Biden, and Chuck Schumer are wrong on this, and I’m going to do everything I can to slow them down at the very least and possibly there’ll be enough of an uprising of people calling in and saying, ‘Mitch McConnell, who are you? Do you represent the Republicans, do you represent conservatives, are you in lockstep with Chuck Schumer?’ There needs to be an uprising in the country, and if that happens, we still have a chance we can stop this.”

Watch the clip above via Fox Business Network