Rand Paul stopped giving interviews to national media last week in an effort to stave off the avalanche of bad press following his attack on the 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawing segregation in businesses of public accommodation. He joined Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia and Minister Louis Farrakhan in being one of only three people ever to cancel a scheduled interview with Meet the Press. The idea, I suppose, was that by keeping Paul out of the national press the campaign might be able to avoid having to answer questions about some of his more controversial stances.
The problem is that we have this series of tubes that allows communication across vast distances, which means even if you go on a Russian TV station to express your views, the rest of the media can still find out about it. In this instance, Paul expressed his disdain for the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which extends citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil:
The real problem, Paul said, is that the U.S. "shouldn't provide an easy route to citizenship" because of "demographics."
According to Paul, the proportion of Mexican immigrants that register as Democrats is 3-to-1, so of course "the Democrat Party is for easy citizenship."
He added: "We're the only country that I know that allows people to come in illegally, have a baby, and then that baby becomes a citizen. And I think that should stop also."
Look, the point of the 14th Amendment was to extend citizenship to everyone in the U.S. regardless of race. That's why it was passed. Now Paul is arguing that the children of non-citizens shouldn't get U.S. citizenship because the "demographics" favor his political opponents. It's really an extraordinary insight into the constitutional vision of Rand Paul, whose "fidelity" to the text is at its strongest when defending the right of people to discriminate on the basis of race, gender, or sexual orientation, and at its weakest when it protects black people's rights to avoid being discriminated against, women's rights to choose when they give birth, Muslims' rights to due process, or consenting adults' rights to choose whom they can marry. There has never been a more glibertarian candidate.
Paul is the conservative version of that irritating campus liberal with a closet full of Che shirts -- completely oblivious to the real-world implications of his ideas, consistently mistaking enthusiasm for depth and foolishness for intellectual bravery.
-- A. Serwer
