AP Photo/Andrew Harnik
In the political world, legislative hijinks, oratorical grandstanding, and intramural savagery are nothing new. But when U.S. Senator Rand Paul, the Republican presidential candidate, scuttled the passage of a bill that would have renewed the USA PATRIOT Act on May 31, he brought those three methods together in the service of an electoral campaign the polls give him long odds of winning, and in a way that aimed fusillades of personal ambition even closer to the heart of American democracy than is customary-especially for a first-termer.
As long as C-SPAN has existed, denizens of the U.S. Capitol have recognized the value of staging floor speeches designed for capture by the television cameras. But Paul upped the ante in 2013 with his 13-hour diatribe decrying the use of drones to kill American citizens overseas-a stunt that won him the love not only of his neo-libertarian fan base, but of ostensibly progressive fanboys, as well. (Never mind that Paul opposes a significant provision of the Civil Rights Act, or that he's antichoice to the extreme; those positions, if made manifest in law, wouldn't touch the rights of the overwhelmingly white bro-gressives who took to Twitter with the hashtag, #StandWithRand.)
This time around, however, Paul coupled his dramatic marathon with legislative stonewalling designed to actually force the expiration of key portions of the PATRIOT Act-if only for a time period measured in hours-in stated opposition to the massive data collection conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA) that was exposed by Edward Snowden. (On June 2, the Senate advanced a replacement bill, the U.S.A. Freedom Act, which has been passed by the House, but reins in some of the NSA's data-mining activities.) Coupled with his filibuster-ish floor speech was an aggressive online fundraising campaign, featuring selfies of supporters (including his dad, Ron Paul, the erstwhile presidential candidate of choice by a particular band of college-age inebriates) next to screen images of the younger Paul performing his C-SPAN tricks. From that crowd, Paul surely won bonus points for showing Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the senior senator from Paul's Kentucky home, just who's really the boss. Rand Paul, stickin' it to the Man! (Never mind that the Man endorsed your presidential campaign.)
Please don't mistake me for a believer in the virtue of metadata collection or death by droning. But if it's protection from NSA snooping you want, note that there is another presidential candidate who is every bit as opposed the spy agency's collection of your phone activity as is the neo-Confederate from the Bluegrass State, but who also supports the rights of women and people who aren't white. Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist running for the Democratic presidential nomination, is pretty good at the speechifying himself, but when it comes to carrying out his responsibilities in the World's Greatest Deliberative body, he apparently doesn't see the need to throw water balloons off an overpass to show the world that he can cause a pile-up.
Those who mistake Rand Paul's showboating as the actions of a Man of Principle should consider just which principles he chooses to act out for the cameras, and those he does not.
Yes, the case he makes against the phone data collection is a constitutional one, but so, too, was the case he made against the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), on whose 2012 renewal he cast a "nay" vote. In a letter to a constituent dated May 4, 2012, Rand Paul explained that his main objection to VAWA (S. 1925) was a constitutional one-he presumably read the bill as in conflict with the 10th Amendment. Paul wrote:
Under our Constitution, states are given the responsibility for prosecution of those violent crimes. They don't need Washington telling them how to provide services and prosecute criminals in these cases. Under the Constitution, states are responsible for enacting and enforcing criminal law. As written, S. 1925 muddles the lines between federal, state, local and tribal law enforcement.
Yet we did not see the Man of Principle standing up to filibuster against that one, now, did we? I mean, imagine that, Rand Paul yammering for 13 hours on the Senate floor about why those vulnerable to gender-based violence-in a country where the majority of violence against women is conducted by their intimate partners-don't deserve federal protection because their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is trumped by states' rights.
And when Rachel Maddow put Paul's constitutional convictions to the test over the public accommodations section of the Civil Rights Act-the then-senatorial candidate had stated his opposition to the section of the act that desegregated lunch counters and department stores and all other privately owned businesses that serve the public-the Man of Principle ultimately, if reluctantly, stated that, well, he would vote for the Civil Rights Act if it came before him, even if he really doesn't think that piece of the landmark legislation passes constitutional muster.
The calculus of the Paul campaign in the candidate's choice of principles over which to hold his leadership hostage is cunning: In a Republican field crowded by religious right-wingers who hold nearly identical, hawkish views on foreign policy, Paul's early neo-isolationism (since tempered by a sudden turn against negotiations with Iran) is a handicap. But his opposition to government snooping, as well as the targeting for assassination of U.S. citizens abroad deemed to pose a terrorist threat, plays well to two constituencies: the paranoid far-right, and the white millennials he seeks to draw to the Iowa caucuses and the Republican primaries.
As Bloomberg News's David Weigel wrote, following Paul through a campaign tour of South Carolina, "At times, Paul's focus on the Patriot Act worked like a skeleton key, unlocking doors that might have been slammed on him."
If the occupants of the proverbial clown car divvy up the vote rather evenly between them because of similarity of views, the outlier has a shot at scooping up the highest percentage.
Of the latter, he has surely studied the 2008 Obama campaign playbook. Obama won Iowa by organizing people-especially young people-who don't ordinarily vote in the caucuses. Early victories bring early money, and the buzz that sometimes translate into momentum.
There's one big difference, though. The Senate may have been Obama's launching pad to the White House, but he took his legislative responsibilities seriously.
In the case of Rand Paul, everything is always all about him. Of those who criticized his PATRIOT antics (you listening, Lindsey Graham?), Kentucky's junior senator said: "Some of them, I think, secretly want there to be an attack on the United States so they can blame it on me."
There's a guy who can really make things happen.
