“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
Tag: Rand Paul
“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
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”).
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.
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 
governments 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.
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.
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: