It seems as though Rand Paul, the Republican candidate for the United States Senate from Kentucky, son of Texas Rep. Ron Paul, and self-proclaimed representative of the Tea Party movement, has some serious difficulty explaining his approach to questions of race and civil rights. During an appearance on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show, Paul started by saying that he liked civil rights and opposed discrimination; he even claimed he would have marched with Martin Luther King had he been old enough. However, he suggested that he would seek to end the parts of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that required privately-owned businesses that served the public to desegregate. Just as Paul was misrepresenting his ability to join the 1963 March on Washington (he was born in 1963), he was also attempting the impossible feat of appropriating King’s legacy while arguing for dismantling one of the movement’s most substantive victories.
When pushed by Maddow to explain comments he had made to The Louisville Courier-Journal, Paul argued that the parts of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that require private businesses serving the general public to serve all customers without regards to their race, gender, religion, or national origin need further “discussion.” He insisted that he agreed with the parts of the act that required publicly owned facilities like public transportation to serve everyone regardless of race, but that private businesses should have been exempt. He asserted that the government shouldn’t “want to harbor in on private businesses and their policies” and that by forcing businesses to integrate the Civil Rights Act was deciding “that restaurants are publicly owned rather than privately owned.” According to Paul, the historic battle to be served at lunch counters at Woolworths or Kress stores, or use the public restrooms or water fountains in those stores was, in fact, an intrusion. For Paul, the desegregation of these businesses was a kind of “government takeover” that infringed on the First Amendment rights of segregationist business owners to say “abhorrent things.”
Paul’s comments echo the arguments made for segregation in his state before the turn of the 20th century. In 1891 it was State Senator Tipton Miller from rural Calloway County, Kentucky who proposed a new law requiring railroads “to furnish separate coaches or cars for the travel or transportation of the white and colored passengers.” It detailed an efficient and cost effective means for privately owned railroad lines to divide passengers that left blacks jammed behind uncomfortable partitions marked with “appropriate words in plain letters indicating the race for which it is set apart.” Segregation was favored by businesses in Kentucky and the new law was a way to codify the preferences of white passengers throughout the state.
In response, a group of black educators, ministers, and businesspeople from Kentucky organized the Anti-Separate Coach movement. They attempted to halt the passage of the separate coach law, organizing mass meetings, drawing up protest documents, and presenting petitions to the governor and the state legislators. They called their campaign “moral warfare” and insisted that they deserved “true and just recognition” in every part of their society. Their battle continued even after the law was passed, and they organized a test case to challenge the new law. However the federal court upheld Kentucky’s segregation law as constitutional, arguing integration would make African Americans “the special favorite of the laws.”
Based on the idea that businesses should have a right to chose whom they would serve, within the next two decades there would be no places for black travelers to ride without unjust treatment, no places where they could eat while traveling, and no hotels where they could stay overnight. The first law that offered substantive relief to millions of black southerners was the hard fought for 1964 Civil Rights Act, which defined public accommodations as hotels, stores, gas stations, and restaurants that serve the general public. Paul’s argument that he is “for civil rights” yet against this “intrusion” in private business, strikes at the heart of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and attacks the legacy of protest in his state and our nation.
Here, via Oliver Willis and Steve Benen, is a clip of Sens. Al Franken, Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul discussing a bill that would help prevent senior hunger:
As Sanders and Franken explain: If we make sure old folks have money for and access to adequate nutrition, fewer of them will need to be hospitalized or placed in nursing homes. Because Medicare would pay a lot more money for hospitalization or nursing home care than it would cost to make sure these old folks don’t go hungry to begin with, this program is cost-effective in addition to being humane.
Here is Rand Paul’s rebuttal: “It’s curious that only in Washington can you spend $2 billion and claim that you’re saving money.” Then he went “hyck hyck hyck” and looked sort of smug. When the basic idea — sometimes spending a bit of money now saves a lot of money later! — was explained to him again, his response was to say something about the government being bad, and to suggest that if this insane magical spending-to-save thing is true, why not spend a ZILLION dollars feeding old people? (The cheapest option, I guess, would just be to not pay for old people to eat or go to the hospital at all, and to let them die in their homes and be buried in pauper’s graves, but it is maybe rude to suggest that that is Paul’s “plan.”)
Rand Paul is either presenting a misleadingly simplistic argument because he knows it will appeal to dumb conservatives (only a big-city liberal would think you could save money in the future by spending it wisely in the present!) or he’s actually as dumb as I have always said he is.
He’s obviously some combination of willfully obtuse and dimwitted, but how much of his dimwitted is calculated?
Like, for example, when he said he wanted to shut down the Department of Education because of “the idea of somebody in Washington deciding that Susie has two mommies is an appropriate family situation,” he was obviously being an inflammatory bigot asshole, probably because he thinks his constituents are backward hicks who eat that kinda shit up. But does he also not actually know what the Department of Education does? Because they have no say in curricula!
And oh, also, when he said he would filibuster every budget that wasn’t balanced, was he just making stupid and unrealistic promises because, again, he has no respect for the intelligence of Kentucky voters, or did he actually not understand that senators can’t filibuster budgets?
“Tea Party” Senator Randall “Rand” Paul (R-Ky.) says he supports free speech, but does he actually want his own supporters jailed for sedition? Definitely yes, according to a shocking audio recording!
Paul is mostly good on civil liberties — he was one of the few senators to oppose the extension of the Patriot Act — but he is also kind of dumb, and he often makes dumb arguments, especially when speaking extemporaneously. And that is how, on Sean Hannity’s radio show last Friday, Rand Paul announced his support for the deportation of Tea Partiers:
PAUL: I’m not for profiling people on the color of their skin, or on their religion, but I would take into account where they’ve been traveling and perhaps, you might have to indirectly take into account whether or not they’ve been going to radical political speeches by religious leaders. It wouldn’t be that they are Islamic. But if someone is attending speeches from someone who is promoting the violent overthrow of our government, that’s really an offense that we should be going after — they should be deported or put in prison.
Hah, what? Rand Paul is against profiling based on race, and prefers… the criminalization of speech. Not just the act of of speaking, but of witnessing speech.
And if “radical political speeches by religious leaders” — of all religions! — and “speeches from someone who is promoting the violent overthrow of our government” are now cause for imprisonment or deportation, that means we must lock upall Tea Party rally attendees.
This has been another in installment in my ongoing series, “If I were a smart libertarian I’d be embarrassed to have Rand Paul represent my philosophy to the nation.”
So considering his history of smugly saying stupid things, no one should be surprised that Sen. Paul said this:
With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have realize what that implies. It’s not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses.
[...]
I’m a physician in your community and you say you have a right to health care. You have a right to beat down my door with the police, escort me away and force me to take care of you? That’s ultimately what the right to free health care would be.
Offensive, insulting, infused with the self-pitying victimology of the very privileged, and so self-evidently dumb that a college freshman who just discovered Ayn Rand would be embarrassed to have said it. It’s a Rand Paul argument, all right! Why are you trying to enslave Rand Paul, by having the government offer him money to treat people? That is literally human bondage. You jackbooted “Medicare” thugs will get Doctor Paul’s phoropter from his cold, dead hands!
The nice thing about Paul is that he makes many Randian arguments sound precisely as stupid as they are. If I were a non-stupid libertarian I would probably not get much joy from Paul’s success and prominence.
Texas libertarian Ron Paul will probably run for president again. But if he doesn’t, his son, brand-new Republican Senator Rand Paul just might run instead. Which one would make the better candidate? Which one has even a shot at winning a single primary or caucus, anywhere? Probably neither one, but that is no reason why we cannot compare and contrast their “strengths” in a hypothetical 2012 match-up:
Ben Quayle was elected to Congress to represent Arizona’s third district despite the fact that he never voted in local elections, posed with children that weren’t his in a mailer, released a series of remarkably creepy ads, has led a life of few accomplishments, is known solely for being the son of a national punchline, co-founded and contributed to a misogynistic website of frat humor and dirty pictures, and was alleged by his former “Dirty Scottsdale” colleague to have had some sort of run-in with a “crazy hooker.” On the other hand, he promised to “knock the hell out of” Washington DC, if elected. And last night, this outsider dressed up in a tux to attend and tell jokes at the 67th annual Radio-TV Correspondents Dinner, one of those regular gala events where Washington’s powerful pols mingle and party with the journalists who cover them. Just knocking away at those Beltway elites, that Ben Quayle.
Quayle bombed. (His “caustic routine drew little more than an awkward silence from the large audience,” Politico CLICK wrote. That’s a pan at Politico CLICK.) He was creepy, stilted, mean, and unfunny. He basically confirmed, live on C-SPAN 3, that he is exactly who you thought he was.
Tea Party outsider Rand Paul also put on his monkey suit and delivered some moldy gags to the Washington lifers who are destroying America. His worst weird and uncomfortable jokes were about Aqua Buddha and Rachel Maddow. Second-generation anti-Washington politicians have horrible delivery.
All of these dinners are basically awful, of course, but rarely do quite so many people who deeply detest Washington, Beltway cocktail parties, and the media attend them.
Rand Paul is a candidate for the U.S. Senate from Kentucky. On May 18, 2010, he won the Republican Party’s nomination, defeating Trey Grayson, Kentucky’s secretary of state, by a 59-36 percent margin. He will face Democrat Jack Conway, the state’s current attorney general, in the general election on November 2.
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