Paul has long represented these, and similar liberty oriented positions. He has a strong libertarian ideology bent and is mostly consistent about it.
These are not positions you take in order to win the Presidency, and he does not have a realistic shot at winning. That will go to eg Bush or Clinton, both of which are pro war, and pro surveillance.
>He has a strong libertarian ideology bent and is mostly consistent about it and is mostly consistent about it.
Except when it comes to:
A woman's right to choose
Gay Marriage
Legalizing Recreational Drugs
US Foreign Policy
He is a politician and as he is being groomed for making a run for presidency he is backpeddling. Which is consistent with every president in modern US history.
1) He's against the present interventionist foreign policy. he has been extremely clear about that for years.
2) He's in favor of states being left to decide for themselves about drug legalization. If Texas wants to support the legalization of pot, his position is that that is up to Texas voters.
2a) Paul constantly makes the point that the war on drugs has been a disaster, and constantly hits against the mass incarceration system we have today. He makes the point non-stop. He points out the unfairness of our current system, such that it's putting black people in prison for the same things white people are getting away with (drug use).
3) He's in favor of states being left to choose about both abortion and gay marriage.
4) He is not in favor of any federal legislation to outlaw either abortion or gay marriage. Paul has said he would not attempt to change present laws on abortion.
S.583 - A bill to implement equal protection under the 14th article of amendment to the Constitution for the right to life of each born and preborn human person.
Leaving up to the states to decide isn't freedom-oriented. It just kicks the can down the road. It absolves him of the responsibility of taking a stand on any of those issues.
False. Your influence as a voter is much greater at the state and local level than the federal level. On an individual basis, you have much more freedom to make your own choices and have them honored if the vote is left to your state or local government.
By your logic anyone who does not support the United Nations having binding legal powers to force the entire world to allow gay marriage, and the means to enforce compliance, is anti freedom and anti gay.
freedom is partly self determination. not having laws stuffed down our throats by Washington is freedom (it could be marriage today, but more anti drug laws tomorrow)
Know how much gay people marrying each other affects your life, if you're not gay and have no plans to marry someone of the same sex?
Zero. It doesn't affect you. Whether gay people marry one another doesn't affect a lot of the people who oppose gay marriage, because it's an entirely private matter.
Apply the same for a lot of other issues.
If you're a business owner, and enjoy the benefits the law gives to business owners, then you play by a slightly different set of rules; you don't get maximal freedom to choose your customers, you have limits in some general ways once you open a business to the public. That set of rules changes from time to time.
If Rand Paul was to have his way entirely, his stance would be for the government to stay out of marriage altogether, straight or gay. That is to say, Rand Paul does NOT oppose gay marriage, he oppose marriage being a LEGAL CONCEPT at all. You should be free to call yourself being married to anyone, and you don't need any recognition to do that.
Now, of course he won't get his way with that, so the next best things is to localize the effect of the law: if you dislike the law of where you're staying, it would be a lot easier if you can just move to the next city with a different set of laws that you agree with. That's basically the overarching ideal of libertarian: liberty and freedom of choice trumps all. There aren't much to choose if the law is federal (or if it's Earth-wide, to take to the extreme). In the US, that would for practical purposes mean advocate for State law over federal law.
There are many things to dislike about libertarian and Rand Paul (his version of libertarian is kind of Objectivism, which is quite ugly). But to characterize Rand Paul's stance as "opposing to gay marriage" is misleading. Calling him "opposing to X", with X being some perceived good thing is (most of the time) attacking a strawman. He's pretty much just opposing to making more law, in general.
Edit: you said that "It absolves him of the responsibility of taking a stand on any of those issues" in one of the comment above. Yes that's the whole point of his ideal: it doesn't matter what his stance is, you're free to do whatever you want.
> That is to say, Rand Paul does NOT oppose gay marriage, he oppose marriage being a LEGAL CONCEPT at all.
No, he believes that marriage contracts (LEGAL TERM) should be available for same sex couples.
He also believes that legal issues (like tax codes) should not mention marriage.
To make an opinion, as someone who firmly supports equal rights for all Americans, regardless of gender or sexuality (or any other dimension), Rand Paul is not someone I support.
Taking the position that it's none of the federal government's business is perfectly sensible.
For many issues, it would be even more preferable to have such rights positively enforced at the federal level, but we have a process for doing exactly that: propose a constitutional amendment that gives the federal government the power to enforce that. It's perfectly consistent to hold the position that the federal government simply doesn't have any power that would give it a say one way or another.
Fortunately his wikipedia page confirms what I said.
He's against our interventionist foreign policy:
- "He says he would have voted against the invasion of Iraq"
- "Paul also spoke against U.S. overseas military bases"
- "During his 2010 Senate campaign Paul questioned the idea that U.S. Middle East policy is 'killing more terrorists than it creates'"
- "Paul believes that when the United States goes to war, Congress must declare war as mandated by the United States Constitution"
More examples confirming what I said:
"Paul believes the issue of medical marijuana is a states' rights issue and that the federal government should not interfere"
"Paul was one of three U.S. senators in 2015 to introduce a bipartisan bill, CARERS, that would legalize medical marijuana under federal law"
- "Paul has expressed doubt about the fairness of mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines"
- "He believes that these laws are applied disproportionately to African Americans, arguing that non-violent drug offenses have contributed to a third of African American males being unable to vote"
"Paul supported a Kentucky bill that would restore voting rights to felons after a five-year waiting period"
"In a 2014 op-ed in Time magazine, Paul criticized the increased militarization of law enforcement"
"Paul's staffers say he believes [on gay marriage] the issue should be left to the states to decide"
"He has said he thought that the Supreme Court's ruling in Windsor v. United States, which struck down the portion of the Defense of Marriage Act that defined marriage at a federal level (as between a man and a woman), was appropriate"
Legalizing Recreational Drugs Use is not the same as Legalizing Medical Marijuana Use.
Second, we're both cherry picking sections from that article to make our point. Except I'm not trying to defending his political ideologies, just pointing out he is like every other major politician who has attempted a run for the presidency: says one thing, but in order to shore up their base, will say something else.
One isn't a libertarian if they simply say "let the states figure it out." That's the ideology of small-government focused conservatives.
A libertarian's point of view would be "Government (federal, state, city) should stay out of lives of people w.r.t (drugs, guns, bedroom).
None of what you've written suggests he has that mentality.
I wouldn't look at it so cynically. The man might be in the Republican Party, but like his father, he is a man of personal ideals, not one to tow the party line.
Based on analysis of multiple outside rankings,
Paul is an average Republican member of Congress,
meaning he will vote with the Republican Party on
the majority of bills.
That says absolutely nothing specific about what is actually being voted on or against.
That doesn't tell me if he votes with Congress on war policies, different budget issues, drug policy, incarceration policy, surveillance policy, et al.
Averages on something like that are almost entirely worthless.
You'd have to be specific on what he voted on, and why. Or what he voted against, and why.
As Bernie Sanders pointed out in an AMA the other day, he often has to vote against some thing (a smaller part of a bill) he is in favor of, because a bill contains a far bigger issue that needs voted against.
I'm not a fan of all of Rand Paul's positions; but the reason why he said that was that it prohibited businesses from serving people they don't want to serve. The instance he gave was the Jewish Store owner that would be forced to serve a neo-nazi.
The Civil Rights act keeps business owners from truly owning whom they can serve; which unfortunately keeps an essential part of social pressure from happening. Imagine if businesses could refuse services to anyone who didn't vaccinate their children? Or refuse service to people who are bigots?
Part of the issue with the CRA is the issue with all sorts of legislation: In its zeal to right wrongs, it has plenty of unintended consequences that have side-effects that can't be forseen.
Well, right, because business owners perpetuated structural racism. If they'd all decided that black folks' money was as good as whites', we wouldn't have needed the government to take action.
The hypothetical of the Jewish store owner being forced to serve a neo-nazi is pretty weak, when the law addressed a real problem (private business owners' personal racism) that affected millions of actual people over the course of their lives.
Reading through your comment history; I recognize that there's no way for us to achieve mutual understanding or have a substantive debate on this issue. Thank you for responding.
I just noticed a flurry of downvotes on all of my comments in this thread. It'd be nice if the randbots could at least try to talk, instead of knee-jerking on the little down arrow.
Don't automatically assume that people who disagree with you are 'randbots'. That would make me downvote (if I had that privilege).
Reasonable people can disagree with you without being a 'bot'. I disagree with Rand Paul on a great number of issues, but I can also disagree with your position without being a Rand Paul supporter.
This is another reason why we can't have a substantive discussion on this issue; when someone jumps to name-calling, it's clear they don't want to discuss the principles of the argument.
Why are you still responding? What kind of rhetorical trick is this?
"I'm not going to talk to you, because there's no way you and I could ever see eye to eye. ..... except now I'm going to call out some part of your behavior I don't agree with."
I can't figure out what you're trying to accomplish; this is a new form of internet snark for me.
Downvoting should be reserved for those who are impairing discussion, not engaging in discussion that I (or in many cases, the groupthink) disagree with.
I think that's the most attractive part of his candidacy for me. I can't support someone who doesn't see that private individuals should be able to make the WRONG choice. That's what freedom is about. If you only have the freedom to make the "right" choice, then you have no freedom at all.
This applies to drugs (he's for allowing individuals to make their own choices here), civil rights act, supporting home schooling, owning guns, etc. he consistently favors freedom of choice. Out of all of the candidates, he's the only one who is even close to a libertarian.
Except by saying "people are free to make the WRONG choice," you're at the same time throwing entire populations under the bus, because...freedom!
The civil rights act didn't spring out of a desire for nanny staters to force us all to listen to Sting and eat kale three times a day. It came out of the fact that, decades after we abolished slavery here, entire regions of the country were filled with businesspeople who habitually discriminated against those former slaves, which couldn't have been good for business, but which they did because they were carrying around racist beliefs which guided their actions.
You could say "those business owners all made the WRONG choice" and, well, ok, but that doesn't really get us anywhere. It's also callous beyond belief to ignore the people that suffered as a result of there being no real consequence for that wrong choice.
True, but they're popular outside the republican base, and Paul has rightly calculated that the base consists of too many older white social conservatives for the party's long-term health.
I don't think he expects to get the nomination for President on his first attempt, and I'm not sure he wants a cabinet post either. Rather, he wants to position himself as a national figure for a more serious run in a future election cycle by laying out a more libertarian-themed party platform now. For example, he's also taking efforts to distance himself from attempts to set abortion policy at a federal level, which he rightly perceives as a liability for the national party.
Although it's an unlikely prospect, I wonder if the internal conflicts in the GOP might manifest as an actual split. Ironically enough the passionate, fire-breathing Tea Party types, who you would expect to be primarily concenred with shrinking government, are actually most likely to support more aggressive foreign policy, expansion and intensification of domestic law enforcement, and hold a hardline attitude on social conservative issues like gay marriage or abortion (these are my anecdotal observations FWIW).
There really is no more Tea Party. It was co-opted by the establishment. The original Tea Party was far more libertarian and stood against all those things you list.
> These are highly unpopular positions among the republican base.
There's a number of states with open primaries now, so its not implausible that Paul's Presidential tactics involve trying to bring non-Republicans (particularly libertarian non-Republicans) in to vote for him in the Republican primaries.
Or to secure support outside the Republican base and then be able to make an electability argument to the primary electorate.
He's not seriously running for president; he's running for his next book deal. And this is nothing but a Rand Paul fundraiser. A serious person, instead of being a showboating idiot, would realize fillibusters accomplish virtually nothing and instead do the serious, real, hard work of building a coalition to advance a cause. Unfortunately, that neither makes good tv nor for good book deals.
viz his "evolution" -- ie complete flip flop -- about drones
> He's not seriously running for president; he's running for his next book deal. And this is nothing but a Rand Paul fundraiser. A serious person, instead of being a showboating idiot, would realize fillibusters accomplish virtually nothing and instead do the serious, real, hard work of building a coalition to advance a cause. Unfortunately, that neither makes good tv nor for good book deals.
Of course, running for President has the same similarity of need with "Good TV" as trying to get good book deals does, so I'm not sure how anything he is currently doing is inconsistent with seriously running for President.
Effectively governing might be related to serious, real, hard work of building a coalition to advance a cause, but effective governing and running for President are, unfortunately, not particularly related to each other.
Civil asset forfeiture
Patriot Act
Broad surveillance
Mass incarceration
War on drugs
etc