Sen. Paul: Tea Party response to Obama address won’t cause division with GOP

The Tea Party response to President Obama's 2013 State of the Union is not a competing response to the official Republican response, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Sunday.

"To me I see it as an extra response. I don’t see it as necessarily divisive," Paul, who is delivering the Tea Party message, said on CNN's "State of the Union." 

"I won’t say anything on there that necessarily is like, ‘Oh, Marco Rubio is wrong.’ He and I don’t always agree. But this isn’t about he and I. This is about the Tea Party —which is a grassroots movement, a real movement with millions of Americans who are still concerned about some of the deal making that goes on in Washington. They’re still concerned about the fact that we’re borrowing $50,000 a second," he added.

"None of the things I ran on as part of the Tea Party have been fixed. We're still going down a hole as far as the debt crisis looming and so we really have to talk about spending and we want to make sure there's a voice for that."

Paul's comments come days after Tea Party Express announced that the senator from Kentucky would deliver the third Tea Party response. Earlier in the week Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) announced that Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) would deliver the official Republican response.

In the same interview Paul weighed in on McConnell's 2014 reelection campaign. Paul said he thinks it's "unlikely" that the top Senate Republican would face a primary challenge from the Tea Party. Paul has said he will support McConnell's reelection campaign.

Actress Ashley Judd has been mentioned as a possible Democratic challenger to McConnell. The conservative super-PAC American Crossroads has already begun airing attack ads against Judd calling her a "radical Hollywood liberal."

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