Tag: Rand Paul

Categories
ballot access

Once Around

State election laws don’t always make it easy for candidates, particularly challengers. Many of these laws are unduly restrictive, especially regarding ballot access.

But some “restrictions” are just what the people want.

Just ask Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.

Paul seems to have his sights set on the White House. But he’s a sitting senator, and 2016, the next presidential election outing, is when he would normally run for re-election. So he’s made it clear that he’d like to retain his spot in the Senate as well as run for the Top Banana position.

But there’s this snag. Kentucky (like some other states) does not allow for one person’s name to appear twice on the same ballot.

Is that a good law? I think so. It breaks up some of the power of incumbency.

And it seems a wrong that the election of a U.S. Senator could be moot and a new election be held when far fewer voters are likely to cast ballots.

Given that it is the voters who have most to lose, in a sense, you can see why Kentuckians like their law. According to a new poll, 54 percent of Republicans, 57 percent of independents, and 78 percent of Democrats oppose changing the law to allow for Rand Paul to run for both. A retired farmer seems to speak for a lot of Kentuckians: “I can see the dilemma,” the man is quoted in the Courier-Journal. “If you’re going to do it, go all the way.”

Of course, Sen. Paul will still be able to test the presidential waters before deciding to bite the bullet. But a time for choosing will come.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment property rights

Property as Persons

Think “corporate personhood” is bad? Well, there’s a far stranger notion in American law: civil forfeiture. That’s where corporeal property is said to have personhood, and thus can be sued — rather than its owner. This goofy doctrine allows governments — state and local, as well as, of course, federal — to take property from people without establishing that the owner had done anything wrong by strict standards of evidence and rules of culpability.

The property is just nabbed, really.

It’s a horrible atavism, an old idea from the bad old days before a rule of law was established. And it encourages governments to be kleptocratic. Whole law enforcement agencies fund their luxuries and perks by this method.

A typical example? “In 2003 a Nebraska state trooper stopped Emiliano Gonzolez for speeding on Interstate 80,” writes Jacob Sullum at Reason, “and found $124,700 inside a cooler on the back seat of the rented Ford Taurus he was driving. Gonzolez said the money was intended to buy a refrigerated truck for a produce business, but the cops figured all that cash must have something to do with illegal drugs.” So the government took the money.

This sort of takings — confiscation — helps drive the drug war, of course.

But it often takes from the innocent as well as the criminal.

Since “suing the property” conforms to neither normal civil nor criminal law, it’s all rigged in the government’s favor. It’s scandalous that courts have ruled it constitutional. Something has to be done to curb its use in America.

Rand Paul wants to reform civil forfeiture. Seems like an awfully small step. How much better to abolish it!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability ideological culture national politics & policies

Rand Paul’s No-Special-Deals Petition

Are you tired of members of the political class foisting burdensome laws on us from which they liberally exempt themselves? Sign the petition.

I mean the “No Special Deals” petition expressing support for “Senator Rand Paul’s Constitutional Amendment to stop Congress from passing legislation that doesn’t apply equally to U.S. citizens, the Executive Branch, Congress and the Supreme Court.”

This is one of those amendments with the job of shouting “Read and adhere to the document I’m attached to!!!!!!!” We need almost as many such amendments as there are constitutional provisions, considering how chronically the Constitution is violated.

The spur is Obamacare, the latest package of law and politics to combine crippling mandates for most of us with special deals for those with political pull. Some people are deemed more equal than others when it comes to “equal protection of the laws” and so forth.

The rationale for equally applying laws that are tyrannical? To discourage tyrants loathe to be battered by their own bludgeons. And to disallow their divide and conquer gambits.

That’s the hope, anyway.

But if officeholders find a way to tyrannize to begin with, and don’t hesitate to tyrannize, will any formally enshrined demand for equality of tyranny serve to deter them?

No, sadly, Sen. Paul’s amendment won’t prevent assaults on our rights that aren’t already supposed to be prohibited by the rest of the Constitution. Not by itself. But the amendment could help and certainly can’t hurt.

(Hurt us, that is —  if it hurts our lawmakers, that’s the idea.)

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
links

Townhall: It’s not about drones

The key issue of last week’s great Rand Paul filibuster was not drone technology, as such, but whether those who run the government will accept the rules of the Constitution. That’s the message from Yours Truly this week on Townhall. Read the column, then come back here for some more links to further facts and opinion.

Categories
video

Video: Rand Paul and the Future of the GOP

“I love Rand, he’s awesome”; “We are the future of the Republican Party”; “The youth are … tired of the same-old/same-old”:

Categories
Accountability national politics & policies responsibility

Get Off the Omnibus

“Not one member of the Senate will read this bill before we vote on it,” said Sen. Rand Paul, last Friday. The junior senator from Kentucky had received the 600-page monstrosity mere hours before, and yet the august solons managed to pass it by a huge majority before close-of-business.

The legislation tackled three big funding extensions — another grab-bag “omnibus” bill in all but name. Obviously a rush job, even with the short turn-around it was too late for the president to sign that weekend.

By Senate internal rules, bills are supposed to be delivered 48 hours before any vote, to give time for senators to peruse their content. “We ought to adhere to our own rules,” said Sen. Paul, who went on to note that 48 hours isn’t that much time to read and comprehend everything in a bill of such length.

Such is the chaos in the Senate, run, apparently, like a business set on course to fail.

In a perhaps quixotic attempt to re-insert some sense of responsibility in the underachieving outfit, Paul has introduced two pieces of legislation, one requiring a day’s wait for every 20 pages of a bill, before voting, another designed to prohibit bills on more than one subject.

Frankly, I’d rather require every senator who votes on a law to be present in the chamber while the law in question is read aloud.

And the “one subject rule” is the kind of thing that many states have, regulating citizen-initiated measures. What’s foisted on the people should definitely be yoked onto the Senate, which obviously needs an omnibus-load of tough “love.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
political challengers

Send in the Clones

As scientists spend grant money attempting to bring into modern times the extinct Woolly Mammoth, conscientious citizens should be concerned about a more pressing matter: cloning our few good leaders before they go extinct. Ron Paul in particular.

The mammoth is a hard thing to clone: DNA breaks down over time.

Leadership requires candidates of good character combined with the right ideas.

The ideas are the DNA. Ron Paul’s have been nicely identified by Nassim Taleb as “The Big Four”: opposition to (1) deficits and metastatic government, (2) Federal Reserve flirting with hyperinflation, (3) self-feeding militarism, and (4) bailouts that undermine economic resilience (“what is fragile should break early and not too late”).Ron Paul's Revolution

Such notions have been available to Americans since the Founding.

But folks with the right character?

That’s more difficult, because each of us is embedded in the institutions we grow up in, and accepting those institutions is natural. This isn’t a problem for leadership to maintain the current system. It is, however, a bit of a snag for producing leaders to help greatly alter the system. The rewards for bucking the system are less immediate than for supporting it.

Ron Paul has been running for the presidency largely to promote real, substantial change. His son, Rand Paul, has taken his ideas and added some successful and politic twists.

There are other, younger leaders emerging in the Ron Paul mode. A few are discussed in the current book, Ron Paul’s Revolution, by Brian Doherty.

But consider: Maybe we don’t want to “send in the clones” — maybe you want to take up the mission. Don’t dismiss the idea out of hand.

Or laugh in a friend’s face if he or she indicates interest, a calling.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability general freedom national politics & policies

Against Regimentation

On Monday, Senator Rand Paul got caught in a contretemps with the TSA. He was not in transit to or from his work in Congress, so he couldn’t enlist constitutional protection from being detained.

And detained he was.

Well, the TSA insists that he was not “at any point detained,” but what he says is this:

I was detained by the Transportation Security Administration . . . for not agreeing to a patdown after an irregularity was found in my full body scan. Despite removing my belt, glasses, wallet and shoes, the scanner and TSA also wanted my dignity. I refused.

I showed them the potentially offending part of my body, my leg. They were not interested. They wanted to touch me and to pat me down. I requested to be rescanned. They refused and detained me in a 10-foot-by-10-foot area reserved for potential terrorists.

Both Senator Paul and his father, Congressman Ron Paul, have criticized the TSA. They echo those 19th century classical liberals who had a word for the kind of treatment that modern security-obsessed Rand Paul makes a statementgovernments inflict upon a (too willing) populace: “regimentation.” What’s more regimenting than being forced to wait in lines, holding shoes in hand, emptying the contents of pockets into institutional-gray trays, submitting to a variety of scans and gropes?

There have got to be better ways of securing big ol’ jet airliners. Why not apply greater legal liability to airlines for safety, and let them figure out more customer-friendly methods of keeping terrorists out of cockpits?

Any government security effort ought to focus on spotting and stopping terrorists . . . without sacrificing everyone’s freedom and dignity.

It’s Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom U.S. Constitution

The End the Bill of Rights Act

Yesterday, on ThisisCommonSense.com, the “Today in Freedom” feature related that 220 years ago — on December 15, 1791 — Virginia’s ratification of the Bill of Rights made those first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution the law of the land.

Hooray! That’s worth remembering and celebrating.

But something else happened yesterday, worth remembering but not celebrating: Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act.

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives [sic] had already passed the legislation. Yesterday, the Democratic-controlled U.S. Senate sent the bill to a President Obama, waiting ready to sign it, with a whopping 86 to 13 vote.

This law says the government can arrest you on U.S. soil, shackle you, pull a hood over your face and hustle you out of the country to Guantanamo if someone somewhere in the government theorizes that you might be a terrorist.

But wait: The Fifth Amendment guarantees that you cannot “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Sixth Amendment states quite clearly that “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial . . .”

Agreed, those proven to be terrorists are terrible people. But in a video posted on our website, Senator Rand Paul, who voted against this bill, pointed out, “Should we err today and remove some of the most important checks on state power in the name of fighting terrorism, then the terrorists have won.”

We can only triumph over terrorism with the Bill of Rights intact.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

Categories
general freedom national politics & policies U.S. Constitution

Video: Civil Liberties During a Never-Ending War

What do you call a defense bill that allows indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay of American citizens accused but not convicted of assisting terrorists without due process? Tyranny. Unconstitutional. Rand Paul compares the now-pending legislation to the hated Egyptian Emergency Law enforced against dissidents for 30 years, which ended with the overthrow of the Mubarak regime: