Rand Paul Has New Target in Budget Bill Fight: Lindsey Graham

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul threw shade at his South Carolinian colleague Lindsey Graham while excoriating Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill” on Fox Business.

In an appearance Wednesday night, Paul argued that Graham had his own reasons for rubber-stamping Republicans’ gargantuan budget bill, which will add $2.4 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years, according to an estimate from the Congressional Budget Office. The bill is expected to cut $1.3 trillion in spending but also cut $3.7 trillion in total revenue, leading to the massive deficit.

“This bill is really a vehicle for Lindsey Graham to secretly explode beyond on the military budget,” Paul said. “They want to explode the military budget beyond the caps. That’s really what the bill is about. So there is a lot of new spending in this bill. If the new spending weren’t in there, it truly would be a bill that would be saving money.”

The legislation would dramatically increase military and border spending, bringing $150 billion to the Pentagon over the next 10 years. Graham, a longtime war hawk, has urged the Trump administration to take a tougher stance on Iran.

Paul also said he didn’t think Congress was mature enough to raise the debt ceiling.

“If you have teenage children and you gave them a credit card and they maxed out $2,000 on booze and gambling, would you give them a bigger credit line or a smaller credit line?” the Kentucky Republican said. “Congress is worse than a bunch of drunken teenagers. They have a history of not being fiscally responsible. You should give them a very short debt ceiling increase and say, ‘Show me and prove to me you’ll act responsibly, and I’ll give you more money.’”

Paul told CNN Wednesday that he could understand Elon Musk’s frustration with the gargantuan spending bill. “The new spending in this bill actually exceeds all the work he did to try to find savings, so I can understand his disappointment,” he said. Earlier that day, Paul had quote-tweeted Musk, arguing that Congress knows adding another $5 trillion to the national debt would be a “huge mistake.”

Donald Trump’s new travel ban is hard to make sense of.

In a sweeping order Wednesday night, Trump fully banned travel from 12 countries: Afghanistan, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen.

The order, which is set to go into effect on June 9, targets mostly African and Muslim-majority countries, and many of the banned countries were also on Trump’s original travel ban in his first term. The new ban also partially restricts travel by nationals from an additional seven countries: Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela.

The order includes exceptions for lawful permanent residents, existing visa holders, and certain visa holders such as Special Immigrant Visas (which many Afghans received after helping U.S. forces).

Trump framed the ban as necessary to combat terrorism and strengthen national security in a video announcement posted to social media. But if that’s the case, the order is full of contradictions.

In his video, Trump specifically cited Sunday’s attack in Colorado as why the ban is needed. “The recent attack in Boulder, Colorado, has underscored the extreme dangers posed to our country by the entry of foreign nationals who are not properly vetted, as well as those who come here as temporary visitors and overstay their visas,” he said.

But the man charged in that attack was an Egyptian national who initially arrived on a tourist visa, and Egypt isn’t even on Trump’s list of banned countries.

Trump’s order also cites visa oversays as a reason why multiple countries were targeted. But as The Washington Post reported, it’s not clear why some countries were added to the list while others with higher visa overstay rates weren’t. In some cases, the visa overstay rate was high but the total number of overstays was relatively low.

The justification listed for specific countries was a mess. The order cited the establishment of “criminal networks” and “national security threats” as justification for the ban on nationals from Haiti. But there is little evidence that Haitian gangs are taking over the U.S., nor is there much evidence that Haitian gang members are among the small number of Haitians entering the country.

“Haitians as a group have not exerted any kind of violence,” Renata Segura, director of the Latin America and Caribbean program at the International Crisis Group, told the Post. “The idea that Haitian gangs could be traveling to the U.S. by legal means is completely out of the realm of the possible.”

And in the case of Venezuela, which is facing partial restrictions, Trump’s order claims the country has “historically refused to accept back its removable nationals.” But in the past few months of Trump’s second term, Venezuela has repeatedly accepted Trump’s deportation flights, even sending Venezuelan planes to pick up immigrant deportees from the U.S.

For those trying to make sense of Trump’s logic with this order, don’t even bother.

President Trump is still trying to turn President Joe Biden’s autopen use into a real scandal, announcing an investigation Wednesday into the pen and its role in an alleged coverup of Biden’s cognitive decline. The former president immediately slammed the move.

“Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations,” Biden said in a statement. “Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false.... This is nothing more than a distraction by Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans who are working to push disastrous legislation that would cut essential programs like Medicaid and raise costs on American families, all to pay for tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy and big corporations.”

Trump has been accusing Biden of using an autopen—essentially a signature machine to aid presidents in signing multiple bills in one sitting—for months now, in an attempt to create both a corruption scandal and a cognitive decline scandal around the former president. At one point, Trump even suggested that Senator Elizabeth Warren was using the autopen in place of Biden.

“With the exception of the RIGGED PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2020, THE AUTOPEN IS THE BIGGEST POLITICAL SCANDAL IN AMERICAN HISTORY!!!” Trump posted on Truth Social Wednesday.

The autopen is nowhere near as big of a deal as Trump is making it out to be, if at all. Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, John F. Kennedy, Barack Obama, and Trump himself have all used it, although Trump swears it’s “only for very important papers.”

For this to be at the top of Trump’s mind while his One Big Beautiful Bill Act is in the midst of Senate gridlock shows how much of a nothingburger this issue is—especially compared to the myriad of scandalous events surrounding Trump’s own tenure as president.

Despite kowtowing and bowing its head, Columbia University is now the victim of more attacks from the Trump administration.

The Department of Education challenged the Ivy League school’s accreditation Wednesday, writing to the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, which accredits Columbia, that the university had violated civil rights law in its handling of on-campus protests supporting Palestine.

“After Hamas’ October 7, 2023, terror attack on Israel, Columbia University’s leadership acted with deliberate indifference towards the harassment of Jewish students on its campus,” said Education Secretary Linda McMahon in a statement. “This is not only immoral, but also unlawful.”

“Just as the Department of Education has an obligation to uphold federal antidiscrimination law, university accreditors have an obligation to ensure member institutions abide by their standards,” McMahon noted.

The request itself does not revoke Columbia’s accreditation. However, the government urged the Middle States Commission to “take appropriate action” if Columbia failed to come into compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The university would be unable to operate without its accreditation.

The challenge comes as Columbia continues its fight to recoup hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding canceled by the White House in March on claims that university leadership had promulgated antisemitism.

But Columbia University has proven to be just one of many targets that the Trump administration has singled out in its quest to subdue criticism of America’s involvement in Palestinian genocide. Individually, the administration went after Mohsen Mahdawi and Mahmoud Khalil, Palestinian student leaders at Columbia University who participated in the protests.

In April, a federal judge handed Mahdawi his freedom after he was arrested at what he thought was his citizenship interview, claiming that the uncharged scholar’s two-week detention was unfounded.

Last week, a district judge denied Khalil—a Columbia graduate student and green card holder—his request for a preliminary injunction to temporarily halt his deportation proceedings.

In March, the Trump administration raided what they called a Tren de Arauga gang gathering in Texas, arresting dozens of people at five in the morning.

Two months later, The Texas Tribune reports that none of the people they arrested had any gang ties or even criminal records, and that the “Tren de Aragua gathering” they busted was in fact a birthday party. Forty-seven people were arrested in total, including nine children, although it’s unclear if every person taken in was at the birthday party.

The ICE agents and Texas police who raided the birthday party even went so far as to attack the families with flash grenades, scaring them and their children.

“We all started shouting that there were babies—‘Babies, there’s babies,’” said one of the arrested men, who said he was celebrating the fifth birthday of his son and the 28th birthday of his best friend at a house they rented for the weekend. “They were like bombs, like boom.”

ICE also profiled one of the party attendees for his tattoos, based on a thoroughly debunked theory that Tren de Aragua members have specific ink.

“They told me to my face: ‘You know what those stars mean? Those stars are styled by gangsters in your country,’” he told the Tribune. “I said, no. I got these stars when—no kidding—I was starting to leave adolescence, started working. I got them because I liked them and I wanted to get them.”

While ICE has refused to name the detained Venezuelans, the Tribune identified 35 of them. Some were in ICE detention for weeks and were released with ankle monitors. One of the children was even kicked out of school due to missing too many days in detainment. Again, none were charged criminally.

“This is about something much bigger. If it happens to a person who is accused of being a (gang member) today, tomorrow it could happen to you and me,” said Migration Policy Institute director Muzaffar Chishti. “And if the alleged member of this gang does not have the right to contest [charges against them], how can you know I’ll have it? The next person will have it?”

ICE has been putting innocent people through hellish, traumatic arrest events for months now, as Trump, border czar Tom Homan, and deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller march blindly ahead with trying to deport as many people as they possibly can, truth be damned.