Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) heaped contempt on President Barack Obama’s executive overreach in a speech to University of South Carolina students here Tuesday morning, saying that Obama is behaving like a banana republic dictator.
Paul’s harshest criticism of Obama came when he criticized the administration for launching airstrikes against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) without congressional authorization for doing so.
“The president says that ‘if Congress won’t act, I must.’ That sounds like what you hear from a third world autocrat,” Paul said. “That doesn’t sound like someone who believes in a Republic and rule of law. ‘If Congress won’t act, I will’? Congress is too messy for him. Democracy is too messy for him so he’s just going to do whatever the hell he wants.”
The Kentucky Republican clarified that “I think we do have to do something now about ISIS,” and that the terrorist group is “potentially a threat to us — similar to the way Al Qaeda was in 1998 or so. I think we should do something, but the president is going about it the wrong way.”
Paul continued on Obama’s aggressive use of unilateral authority.
“That worries me and it should worry all of us. And it hasn’t been just with war powers. It’s been with immigration, it’s been with healthcare-he’s acted outside the law and we have basically a constitutional confrontation now between an overbearing and arrogant executive who doesn’t believe in the law and a Congress that hasn’t really stepped up to enforce the law,” Paul said.
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