Rand Paul's debut on the national stage was marked by a firestorm over his comment that he would have voted against the Civil Rights Act, on account of the fact that it intruded on a business's "freedom" to discriminate against black people. Since then, Paul has been circumspect about commenting on anything related to civil rights. However, it seems that the Supreme Court's ruling on the Affordable Care Act has caused the Kentucky senator to throw caution to the wind. Via ThinkProgress:
In the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision, can you still argue that the Constitution does not support ObamaCare? The liberal blogosphere apparently thinks the constitutional debate is over. I wonder whether they would have had that opinion the day after the Dred Scott decision.
Think of how our country would look now had the Supreme Court not changed its view of what is constitutional. Think of 1857, when the court handed down the outrageous Dred Scott decision, which said African Americans were not citizens. Think of the "separate but equal" doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson, which the court later repudiated in Brown v. Board of Education.
Obviously, as a supporter of the law, I'm a little biased. But I'm reasonably sure that a law to extend health insurance to millions of Americans-including millions of African Americans-isn't the same as a state-sponsored system of violent repression and forced labor.
