“A Painful Ritual”: Rand Paul, Not So Independent After All
Rand Paul is discovering that being a libertarian-ish senator with a knack for getting the press to pay attention to your sometimes slightly-contrarian views is one thing, while running for president is something else entirely. Paul has moved to paint himself as an outsider and independent thinker in advance of 2016 — but he’s now learning that taking positions that challenge even secondary elements of Republican doctrine is not going to fly.
When there’s a party consensus, a presidential candidate can only contradict it as long as no one’s paying attention. There’s no such thing as an independent-thinking presidential candidate; only one who is sticking to positions he hasn’t yet renounced, but will eventually. Ironically, it’s the GOP, whose members work so hard to characterize themselves as outsiders beholden to no one, where orthodoxy is most strictly enforced.
Paul has now been confronted with the fact that back in 2011 he proposed ending all foreign aid, which seemed like a good idea for him at the time — after all, did you know that most foreign aid goes to…foreigners?!? Egad. Foreign aid is quite unpopular, in part because people wildly overestimate how much we spend on it.
Paul’s problem: The largest recipient of foreign aid is Israel, which gets about $3 billion per year in American taxpayer money. We might want to debate whether Israel really needs that money from us. But that’s not a debate we’re likely to have any time soon, and is sure as heck isn’t a debate anyone’s going to have in a Republican presidential primary, where “supporting Israel” has become an article of dogma.
So Paul had to backtrack. He tried to argue: “I never really proposed [cutting off aid to Israel] in the past.” That could only be true under some elaborate and tortured definition of “really” or “proposed.” In fact, Paul had even made those points about Israel being able to fund itself without our help. But he won’t be saying that kind of thing anymore.
For someone who has built his political brand on being different than other Republicans — by virtue of being a quasi-libertarian and a relative newcomer to politics — this must be a painful ritual to have to enact.
Two months ago, Paul might have brushed off a question about Israel by saying vaguely that we have to look at all parts of the budget to bring down spending. But with Israel on the front pages, he has to line up behind the rest of the party and pledge to support Israel forever and in every way. If the party is genuinely divided on an issue, a candidate has some room to move; this is true of government surveillance, where Paul takes a more libertarian stance than some other Republicans. But once there’s something approaching a consensus, as there is on Israel, dissent will not be tolerated, no matter what you might have said in the past.
Almost all the 2016 GOP candidates are going to portray the race as a contest between a bunch of establishment Washington insiders and one independent outsider (who just happens to be whoever is telling you this — nearly all of them will try to make the claim). But very quickly, they will all have to jump through the same hoops and take the same pledges, even if in some cases it means renouncing their previous positions. By the time it’s over this process will make them substantively almost identical, whatever minor differences they had at the outset.
So if Rand Paul wants everyone to think he’s an independent-minded outsider, maybe he should forget about using issues to do it. Maybe he ought to get himself a ranch and a cowboy hat. It’s worked before.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; Published at The Plum Line, The Washington Post, August 5, 2014
“A Self-Accredited Ophthalmologist”: The Most Credible Candidate For President … Since Henry Clay
Kentucky’s annual Fancy Farm picnic is one of the state’s biggest political events, and this weekend was no exception. Rachel Kleinman had a helpful report on some of what transpired at the gathering.
But there was one quote from the weekend’s festivities from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) that stood out for me. The Republican leader, who’s in a very tough re-election fight this year, reportedly had this to say about his fellow Kentuckian, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).
“I can say this without fear of contradiction: He is the most credible candidate for president of the United States since Henry Clay,” the minority leader reportedly told a county GOP breakfast earlier Saturday, a reference to the Kentucky senator who ran unsuccessfully for president in 1824, 1832 and 1844.
Sam Youngman, a political reporter for the Lexington Herald-Leader, also heard McConnell make the comment, though Youngman believes the senator probably meant the most credible presidential candidate out of Kentucky since Clay.
To be sure, Henry Clay was an accomplished public servant and an exceedingly credible presidential candidate – at different points in his career, Clay was a state legislator, a U.S. House member, a Speaker of the U.S. House, a U.S. senator, and the U.S. Secretary of State. Not too shabby.
Rand Paul was a self-accredited ophthalmologist up until four years ago, when he was elected to the U.S. Senate. To date, he has no major legislative accomplishments to speak of and he’s held no other public office.
I can appreciate McConnell wanting to say nice things about his in-state partner, but referencing Paul and Clay in the same sentence seems like a bit of a stretch.
Of courses, the fact that McConnell would even draw such a comparison in the first place speaks to a larger truth.
It’s easy to forget, but in 2010, McConnell desperately hoped Rand Paul would lose. The party establishment, including the Senate Minority Leader, enthusiastically backed Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson in the GOP primary and assumed he’d win with relative ease.
That, obviously, didn’t happen, and the McConnell-Paul relationship has always been strained.
But when it comes to campaign politics, McConnell is no fool – he and his team can read a poll as easily as anyone else, and they realize that statewide, Rand Paul is far more popular than McConnell. As such, we see the Minority Leader running around making claims he almost certainly doesn’t believe, including the odd notion that Paul “is the most credible candidate for president of the United States since Henry Clay.”
As for the junior senator from the Bluegrass State, Paul apparently sees the partnership as a marriage of convenience. Earlier this year, during an appearance on Glenn Beck’s program, the host asked the senator about his McConnell endorsement. “Uhh, because he asked me,” Paul said. “He asked me when there was nobody else in the race. And I said yes.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 4, 2014
“Soft Bigotry Of Low Expectations”: The Right’s Pathetically Low Curve; How It Got A Pass On Race And Poverty
Rep. Paul Ryan, budget-slasher, releases a paternalistic poverty plan that has one good idea. Sen. Rand Paul, Civil Rights Act skeptic, speaks to the African-American National Urban League. The Koch brothers, backers of voter suppression efforts and union busting, give $25 million to the United Negro College Fund.
And each winds up hailed, even by some liberals, as taking a big step for the Republican Party when it comes to questions of race and poverty. Why do people settle for so little when it comes to the right trying to signal a change in its damaging approach to both?
Ryan’s one good idea is expanding the earned income tax credit, originally a Republican policy that Republicans turned against because Democrats embraced it too. The EITC is one big reason for the “47 percent” of people who pay no taxes that Ryan’s running mate railed against. Now Ryan says he wants to expand it, and some other programs – which doesn’t square with his infamous budget proposals of recent years.
So MSNBC’s Chuck Todd politely asked Ryan to reconcile his poverty plan with his budget plan – which cuts $5 trillion over 10 years, and takes 69 percent of the cuts from low- and moderate-income families – and he couldn’t do it.
“Does this mean you would change your budget proposal to reflect your new poverty plan?” Todd asked.
“No,” Ryan answered. “I didn’t want to get into a debate over the funding levels of the status quo. I want to talk about how to reform the status quo.”
Todd tried again. “So we should ignore your budget proposal for these programs?”
“No, Chuck, what I’m trying to tell you is, let’s not focus on dollars and cents for these programs,” Ryan replied, a little peevishly. “Let’s focus on reforming these programs so they work more effectively.”
Paul Ryan: a profile in equivocation.
Then there’s Rand Paul, continuing his “outreach” to African-Americans with his visit to the Urban League annual convention. Paul actually deserves credit for trying to tackle issues of criminal justice reform with Sen. Cory Booker. But in his Friday speech he also seemed to decry voter suppression laws, insisting his goal is to “help more people vote,” in the words of the Louisville Courier-Journal.
“We have to be together to defend the rights of all minorities,” Paul said.
But Paul flip-flops on this issue every chance he gets. “I don’t think there is objective evidence that we’re precluding African-Americans from voting any longer,” he said last year, after the Supreme Court curtailed the Voting Rights Act. But a few months later, he seemed to have second thoughts.
“Everybody’s gone completely crazy on this voter-ID thing,” Paul the New York Times. “I think it’s wrong for Republicans to go too crazy on this issue because it’s offending people.”
That was big news. But then, confronted by his friends at Fox, he lurched into reverse. Paul assured Sean Hannity he was fully on board with the Republican voter ID strategy. “No, I agree there’s nothing wrong with it. To see Eric Holder you’ve got to show your driver’s license to get in the building. So I don’t really object to having some rules for how we vote. I show my driver’s license every time I vote in Kentucky … and I don’t feel like it is a great burden. So it’s funny that it got reported that way.”
“It’s funny it got reported that way,” when that’s what Paul said. Maybe that’s where Paul Ryan learned how to equivocate.
Then there are the Koch brothers. I said everything I needed to in this story. I’m sympathetic to the UNCF wanting more scholarship funding. But “Koch scholars”? A no-strings gift would be one thing, but scholarships Koch foundation appointees help award, based on a student’s affinity for “entrepreneurship” and the free market is something else entirely.
Liberals who applaud UNCF taking the money, and decry AFSCME’s parting ways with the group, insist it’s possible to separate the principle of education for black children from the Kochs’ funding of efforts to break unions in the public sector – which disproportionately employ their parents – and suppress their voting rights.
But it’s true that all of these moves are preferable to outright race baiting and demonizing black people and the poor, so liberals give them extra credit. Applauding minimal GOP gestures toward decency reflects the soft bigotry of low expectations once again.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, July 25, 2014
“Neocons Have Learned Nothing”: Rand Paul Faces Challenge In Opposing GOP War Hawks
Kentucky senator Rand Paul is a curious vehicle for reformation of the Republican Party. He’s not a font of creative ideas; he’s hobbled by intellectual contradictions; he’s viewed skeptically by his party’s establishment. Still, Paul brings a refreshing view of the limits of warfare to a GOP that has spent the last several decades enthusiastically embracing military interventions across the globe.
So here’s to the senator’s efforts to help his party lay down its battle armor and beat its swords into plowshares. The country needs no more Dick Cheneys and far fewer John McCains.
Paul won’t easily transform the Republican Party’s views on military might. Earlier this month, Texas governor Rick Perry wrote an opinion essay criticizing him as “curiously blind” to the threat represented by international jihadists. “Viewed together, Obama’s policies have certainly led us to this dangerous point in Iraq and Syria, but Paul’s brand of isolationism (or whatever term he prefers) would compound the threat of terrorism even further,” Perry wrote in The Washington Post.
As much as anything, that’s a sign that Perry is considering once again seeking the GOP nomination for president and sees Paul as a significant rival. One way to knock off Paul, Perry believes, is to play to the GOP’s armchair hawks, who haven’t tired of sending other people’s sons and daughters to war.
Paul immediately fought back with an op-ed of his own, published in Washington-based Politico. “Unlike Perry, I oppose sending American troops back into Iraq. After a decade of the United States training Iraq’s military, when confronted by the enemy, the Iraqis dropped their weapons, shed their uniforms and hid. Our soldiers’ hard work and sacrifice should be worth more than that,” he wrote.
While Paul’s views are closer to those of the American people, there is still a significant partisan divide — a challenge for the senator. Half of Americans now say the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, while only 38 percent say it was the right decision, according to the Pew Research Center. (The rest are undecided.) But a closer look at polling shows that 52 percent of Republicans still believe toppling Saddam Hussein was the right thing to do.
That may simply reflect the reluctance of Republican voters to admit the failings of the most recent Republican president, George W. Bush. And GOP leaders know there is a lot of political fodder in knocking President Obama’s foreign policy, even if few of them present alternatives. They denounce the president’s international leadership as feckless, weak and naive — red-meat rhetoric that fires up the base.
That means Paul will have to be not only smart but also courageous if he is to help his party find a more reasonable response to a complex world. The impulse to bend the globe to our will ought to be resisted, as should the instinct to continue to feed the military-industrial complex by draining the national treasury.
One of the reasons we ended up on a misguided mission in Iraq was that Democrats failed to put up enough resistance to the neocons who were then firmly in charge of the GOP. The doomed Vietnam War (though prosecuted by Democratic presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson) had left Democrats labeled wimps and cowards — a reputation they couldn’t shake. As a result, too many who should have known better, including then-senators Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and John Edwards, voted to give Bush the authority to oust Saddam.
It took Obama’s victory — he campaigned as a critic of the Iraq invasion — to help leading Democratic pols find the courage to resist a “dumb war.” There are still military interventionists in the Democratic Party, but there are far fewer who would support a war in hopes of appearing strong on the national stage.
The Republican Party hasn’t yet managed that transition. Its neocons have learned nothing from their years of folly, with Cheney and the entire cohort of Iraq War cheerleaders refusing to admit their mistakes. But if Paul can win enough support from his party’s base, he can help the GOP come to terms with a world America cannot rule.
By: Cynthia Tucker, Visiting Professor at the University of Georgia, The National Memo, July 19, 2014
“Mr. States Rights In A Political Pickle”: How The Constitution May Screw Rand Paul For 2016
Rand Paul has a little-discussed problem. Yes, he’s riding a wave. Yet another new poll brings happy tidings, putting him at the top of the GOP heap in both Iowa and New Hampshire (although still well behind “undecided”). He keeps doing these clever things that titillate the Beltway sages, like coupling with Democratic Sen. Cory Booker (ooh, he’s black!) on sentencing reform. All this, you know. He’s a shrewdie, we have to give him that.
But here’s what you maybe don’t know. Paul is up for reelection in 2016. One assumes that he would want to hold on to his Senate seat. If he ran for president, he would hardly be the first person hoping to appear on a national ticket while simultaneously seeking reelection, although the other examples from the last 30 years have all been vice-presidential candidates: Paul Ryan in 2012, Joe Biden in 2008, Joe Lieberman in 2000, and… trivia question, who’s the fourth?
For those, it hadn’t been a problem. But it is for Paul, because under Kentucky law, he cannot run for two offices at the same time. The law has been on the books in the Bluegrass State for a long time. Paul quietly asked that it be changed, and the GOP-controlled state senate acquiesced this past session. But the Democrats have the majority in the lower house, and they let the bill expire without voting on it. I would reckon, unless the Kentucky state house’s Democratic majority is possessed of a shockingly benevolent character unlike every other legislative majority I’ve ever encountered, it won’t be rushing to pass it.
Paul has said that he’d just ignore the law.
We should stop and pause to appreciate that: Rand Paul, of all people, arguing that states don’t have the authority to dictate the rules for federal elections. Yes, Mr. States’ Rights insists that this is the province of the federal government!
It gets even better. The tradition that states set the rules of their elections and always have was not handed to us by a bunch of pinko mid-century judges, but lo and behold, by the Framers themselves. I give you Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of choosing Senators.” So not only is Mr. States’ Rights backing the federal jackboot as long as it’s kicking on his behalf, but Mr. Tea Party Strict Constitutionalist is challenging the Constitution!
Here’s what the Supreme Court has had to say on the matter. There are two cases that are most relevant, U.S. Term Limits Inc. v. Thornton and Cook v. Gralike. In those cases, the court held that Arkansas and Missouri’s respective term-limit laws added extra qualifications to seek office that weren’t found in Article I, Sections 2 and 3 of the Constitution (the sections that state the qualifications for candidates for the House of Representatives and the Senate). That is, the court protected candidates who had served X number of terms and were thus, under those states’ laws, prohibited from seeking office again. You can’t do that, said the court to states; you’re in essence adding an extra-constitutional “qualification” for office (that a candidate can’t have served more than three terms). Sen. Paul can argue that Kentucky’s law imposes an extra-constitutional qualification on him—that if he wants to run for president, the state has added the “qualification” that he not also run for Senate.
I’m no lawyer, but that sounds like a reach to me. A term-limits law is a clear imposition of an added qualification. But a law requiring that a person seek only one office at a time seems to me like a perfectly reasonable thing for a state to decide, under the word “manner” in the relevant constitutional passage, if it wants to. States have had these laws for a long time. Florida has one, too, and Marco Rubio—also up for reelection in 2016 and also considering a White House run—has defended it and said of running for the presidency: “I think, by and large, when you choose to do something as big as that, you’ve really got to be focused on that and not have an exit strategy.”
Paul said in June: “Can you really have equal application of federal law if someone like Paul Ryan or Joe Lieberman can run for two offices, but in Kentucky you would be disallowed? It seems like it might not be equal application of the law to do that. But that means involving a court, and I don’t think we’ve made a decision on that. I think the easier way is to clarify the law.” Touching. I doubt Paul worries too much about the “equal application of federal law” for pregnant women who live in states where they’ve found ways to shut down every federally legal abortion clinic. And of course, historically speaking, there are the black Kentuckians and Southerners generally who weren’t soaking up much equal application of federal law until the passage of the Civil Rights Act that Paul so famously told Rachel Maddow in 2010 he would have opposed.
Paul is going to be in a political pickle over this. Remember, a presidential candidate has never done this in modern history, just vice-presidential ones (trivia answer: Lloyd Bentsen in 1988). Vice president—who really cares. But president? Even if he prevailed in court, can a person really run for president of the United States while also seeking another office? Rubio sounds right here to me. This is the presidency. It just seems cheesy. Plain and simple, Paul should have to choose.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, July 18, 2014
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