Tag: gop libertarianism
Paul Hopes His Opposition To Patriot Act Boosts Campaign Support

Paul Hopes His Opposition To Patriot Act Boosts Campaign Support

By Sean Cockerham, McClatchy Washington Bureau (TNS)

PHILADELPHIA — As his fellow Republican Kentucky senator, Mitch McConnell, pushes this week to reauthorize the Patriot Act, Rand Paul took his presidential campaign to Independence Mall on Monday and said he’d do whatever he could to kill the law and the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records.

“One senator came up to me and said, ‘If you defeat the Patriot Act, what will happen? How could we possibly survive?'” Paul said on a muggy afternoon, outside the Philadelphia hall where the Constitution was adopted. “And I said, ‘Maybe, just maybe, we could rely on the Constitution for a few hours.'”

Paul’s vow to fight the Patriot Act sets up a showdown with McConnell, and it’s an important moment for his campaign. Polls show Paul mired in the middle of a crowded field of Republican contenders, and he’s hoping his threat to filibuster over the mass collection of phone records will bring back the excitement of the 13-hour anti-drone talkathon on the Senate floor two years ago that launched him into national prominence.

“If he pulls this off, I think it will be important in reminding the libertarian/civil liberties-leaning people what it was they liked about this guy in the first place,” said Brian Doherty, senior editor at the libertarian Reason magazine and author of a book about Paul’s father, former presidential candidate Ron Paul.

Rand Paul, who said he intended to filibuster the provision, said this week’s battle over reauthorizing the Patriot Act would be “a great and momentous debate” over the Constitution’s right to privacy. The act, which passed by lopsided margins following the terrorist attacks of September 2001, handed largely unchecked powers to federal investigators to combat terrorism. Since then some courts have found provisions unconstitutional.

But Paul didn’t sound confident of winning. It would take 60 votes in the Senate to defeat his filibuster, but he said, “The rules are tricky in the Senate.”

“We do not have the votes to ultimately defeat the Patriot Act. I can delay it. … What I will demand is we have time on the floor to debate this, and I will demand that amendments that we put forward are given a chance on the Senate floor,” Paul said, surrounded by a crowd of youthful supporters.

Paul’s position on the Patriot Act puts him at sharp odds with his rivals for the Republican nomination. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush called the National Security Agency’s data collection program important for protecting the nation’s security, and “the best part of the Obama administration.”

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., has also defended the program, as has South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, wants changes to the program but doesn’t go as far as Paul. Paul said he’d offer amendments with Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who’s also threatening a filibuster.

Time is running out for the Patriot Act, making Paul’s filibuster threat far more effective. Section 215, used to justify the bulk collection of phone data, is set to expire June 1, as is the “lone wolf” provision, meant to surveil targets not directly connected to terrorist cells, and a measure that allows the government to use roving wiretaps to track suspects who switch phones or locations.

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Congress is scheduled to leave for a weeklong Memorial Day break at the end of this week, so timing is tight. Complicating the debate is an appeals court ruling this month that the mass collection of phone records is illegal because it wasn’t properly authorized under Section 215 of the Patriot Act.

The court let the program continue temporarily, effectively giving Congress a chance to rewrite the surveillance law. The House of Representatives, with the president’s support, passed the USA Freedom Act last week with changes to the bulk collection system, but Paul said the measure didn’t go far enough.

His filibuster threat was cheered by a crowd that had paid $45 apiece to hear him, in a suit and cowboy boots, speak earlier Monday at the National Constitution Center (they’ll also get copies of his book when it comes out May 26.) “It’s a good idea,” said Robert Reed of Pine Hill, N.J. “There is too much government.”

But McConnell, the Senate majority leader, was dismissive Sunday of the filibuster threat being made by his fellow Kentuckian.

“Everybody threatens to filibuster. We’ll see what happens,” McConnell said in appearance on ABC.

McConnell wants to continue the bulk collection of phone records, and he’s pushing for at least a two-month reauthorization of the Patriot Act to allow time to negotiate.

Paul won supporters two years ago when he launched a filibuster in protest of what he deemed a risk of drone strikes to U.S. citizens on American soil. But Republican strategist Ford O’Connell said in an interview that Paul now had a fine line to walk as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination between firing up libertarian-minded backers and not appearing weak on national security and foreign policy.

“Foreign policy is driving him down in the polls, but it’s stances like this on the Patriot Act that are still sparking interest in him,” said O’Connell, who advised the 2008 presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. “He has to be able to use the Patriot Act debate to leverage it into a wider foreign-policy debate.”

Paul, who’s feuded with the hawkish McCain on foreign policy issues, said Monday that American intervention had backfired in Iraq and Libya.

“We get rid of the strongman, and we have chaos and we have the rise of radical Islam,” he said.

(c)2015 McClatchy Washington Bureau, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky speaking at a physician roundtable at the Chaparral Suites in Scottsdale, Arizona. January 15, 2015. (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

GOP’s Libertarians Aren’t All That Libertarian

GOP’s Libertarians Aren’t All That Libertarian

In Republican primary politics, the libertarian brand carries cachet, which explains why many of the GOP’s presidential candidates are battling to position themselves as the one true standard-bearer of small government conservatism. But a funny thing is happening on the way to the Republican primaries: The whole notion of small government libertarianism has been hijacked by politicians who often represent the opposite.

Take Lindsey Graham, whose political action committee is staffing up for the South Carolina Republican senator’s possible presidential run. In an interview with an Iowa newspaper earlier this month, Graham said: “Libertarians want smaller government. Count me in. Libertarians want oversight of government programs and making sure that your freedoms are not easily compromised. Count me in.”

Yet, despite that rhetoric, Graham has been one of the most outspoken proponents of mass surveillance. Indeed, in response to news that the National Security Agency has been vacuuming up millions of Americans’ telephone calls, there was no sign of Graham’s purported small government libertarianism. Instead, he said in 2013, “I’m glad that activity is going on” and declared, “I’m sure we should be doing this.”

Similarly, Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz has reportedly raised millions for his presidential bid, after launching his campaign on a promise of smaller government.

What Cruz doesn’t say in his speeches railing on “unelected bureaucrats” is that he has spent much of his professional life as an unelected government employee, first as an appointee in George W. Bush’s administration, then as an appointee in Texas’ state government. Also unmentioned in Cruz’s announcement speech at Liberty University was data showing that the conservative school has received one of the largest amounts of government Pell Grant funding of any nonprofit university in America, according to the Huffington Post. That fact can be described with a lot of words, but “libertarian” probably isn’t one of them.

Then there is Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul, the candidate who most openly embraces the libertarian brand.

As a senator, he more than others has strayed from GOP orthodoxy and taken some genuinely strong libertarian positions — most notably against the ongoing drug war, surveillance, and the militarization of America’s domestic police force. He has also tried to foment a discussion about the taboo topic of government subsidies to corporations. In January, he said that “we will not cut one penny from the safety net until we’ve cut every penny from corporate welfare” and last month he said that if elected president, he’d slash business subsidies “so I don’t have to cut the Social Security of someone who lives on Social Security.”

However, Paul’s pledges about corporate welfare apparently do not extend to the Pentagon, which has often been a big repository of such welfare for defense contractors. As Time reported in March, “Just weeks before announcing his 2016 presidential bid … Paul is completing an about-face on a longstanding pledge to curb the growth in defense spending.” The magazine noted that he introduced legislation “calling for a nearly $190 billion infusion to the defense budget over the next two years — a roughly 16 percent increase.”

Additionally, Paul is anti-choice on the abortion issue. That’s right, for all of his anti-big-government rhetoric, he supports using the power of huge government to ban women from making their own choices about whether or not to terminate pregnancies.

While few believe across-the-board libertarianism is a pragmatic governing strategy, some of that ideology’s core tenets — like respect for privacy and civil liberties — are valuable, constructive ideals. But when the most famous libertarian icons so often contradict themselves, those ideals are undermined. They end up seeming less like the building blocks of a principled belief system and more like talking points propping up a cheap brand — one designed to hide shopworn partisanship.

David Sirota is a senior writer at the International Business Times and the best-selling author of the books Hostile Takeover, The Uprising, and Back to Our Future. Email him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com. 

Photo: U.S. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky speaking at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. (Gage Skidmore via Flickr)