Taking a Stand

by Rand Paul

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  For Kelley

  if i weren’t so much in love with you

  i’d paint lilacs and lilies

  and stills of fruit languishing in bowls

  insanely my love for you commands

  run headlong into the first volley

  cast caution to the wind

  the bulls run only once

  be fleet

  and flaunt a brazen portrait

  for you know

  love lasts only when the passion bleeds

  and gurgles and rattles as if it might be

  the last gasp

  1

  The Long Stand

  I will speak until I can no longer speak. I will speak as long as it takes, until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important.

  11:47 A.M. March 5 to 12:39 A.M. March 6, 2013

  I was about seven hours into my filibuster when I saw Senator Mark Kirk coming down the senate chamber’s stairs. Mark had suffered a major stroke a little more than a year before, so it took some effort for him to manage the descent. Along with his cane and the smile on his face, he held a thermos and an apple.

  It had been a while since I watched the classic movie, so at first I didn’t understand the significance of what Senator Kirk carried. In the filibuster scene in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Jimmy Stewart’s character, Jefferson Smith, puts an apple and a thermos of tea on his Senate desk.

  To be honest, I didn’t think I was going to get to stand at all, let alone for thirteen hours, which was the full length of the time I held the Senate floor to block the nomination of John O. Brennan as CIA director. I was sure Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, wouldn’t allow the filibuster. But to my surprise he did.

  Had I known, I would have been better prepared.

  When people ask me what I would do differently the next time I stage a filibuster of that length, my answer is simple. “Tennis shoes,” I tell them. “The next time I’ll wear tennis shoes.”

  At the time of the filibuster, I’d been a senator for a little over two years. I’d won my seat by a considerable margin and in doing so took the establishment by surprise. I also came into the Senate carrying a mandate for smaller, more responsible government spurred by a movement that had taken the whole country by surprise. The idea of smaller and more responsible government, however, was nothing new to me. I’ve believed in those values long before there was a Tea Party.

  I was eleven when I first campaigned for my father. Our whole family would stump with him at Texas barbecues and parades. With my brothers, sisters, and cousins, we knocked on literally thousands of doors, handed out campaign literature, and rode around in a van featuring a fat Uncle Sam on the side and the slogan “Put Big Government on a Diet!” You could say I grew up with politics. My father was in Congress for more than twenty years. His first term was back in 1976 when I was just thirteen. As kids, my brother and I would go for paddleboat rides in the Tidal Basin in front of the Jefferson Memorial. In high school, I spent summers in Washington, D.C., working as an unpaid intern in my dad’s office. Later, while attending Baylor University, I was president of Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT). After a year, I was elected to the YCT’s state board. It was there I got to know Stephen Munisteri, who had volunteered for my dad at age seventeen, went on to be a five-year Texas GOP State Chair, and recently became a senior adviser to my presidential campaign.

  While I was completing my ophthalmology residency at the Duke University School of Medicine, my wife, Kelley, and I founded and chaired a watchdog group called North Carolina Taxpayers Union (NCTU), which kept track of state politicians’ spending and pork. Each year we published ratings.

  We were twenty-seven-year-old newlyweds working long and crazy hours—me as a first-year resident in ophthalmology at Duke and Kelley working in marketing communications for Nortel Networks in Research Triangle Park.

  I drove to the legislative library in Raleigh whenever I had free time, pored through massive logs of the legislative votes taken, and created a ratings system based on how each representative had voted on the major spending and tax bills for each session. This was long before any of this information was available on the Internet, so it was tedious and time-consuming work.

  I talked Kelley into writing our pamphlet copy and creating a layout for the ratings—not an easy feat since she was already working long hours and traveling across the country for Nortel.

  We held meetings in our home and persuaded all of our friends—most of whom were other young Duke resident physician couples—to join our group, also not an easy feat since most of them were too busy and frazzled to even think about politics. But we usually included pizza, beer, and Duke basketball on the TV, which enticed plenty of new converts. Walter Jones was a state representative then and an adviser to the group. Walter would go on to win a seat in Congress and become one of my father’s best friends.

  At the end of the state legislative sessions, Kelley and I would go up to the state capitol in Raleigh and hand out report cards to the state lawmakers. Last year, when I was campaigning for Thom Tillis, the newly minted senator from North Carolina, a man came up with an NCTU scorecard from 1992 and asked me to sign it.

  NCTU was my first foray into politics on my own, and even I was surprised by its success and the attention we were able to draw. We made contacts with concerned people from all over the state; one particularly active group was strongly opposed to the idea of a food tax. Within six months after I formed NCTU, both the local nightly news and the Raleigh and Durham papers had covered us. Across North Carolina, candidates used our ratings to run against big-spending incumbents. In a photo from the Raleigh papers, we are standing on the capitol steps with a rented podium and microphone, Kelley in her black Ray-Ban Wayfarers. We look like kids. We were.

  Looking back, I think that our accomplishments with NCTU taught us both an important lesson: that a single person with an idea—and the passion, drive, and energy to put it into action—can make a difference.

  When I finished my ophthalmology training at Duke, Kelley and I moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky, about thirty miles from Russellville, where Kelley’s parents live. There we formed a new taxpayer group called Kentucky Taxpayers United and produced a “taxpayer’s scorecard” with which we rated state legislators once again. By then, however, most of my attention was focused on my young family and the beginning of my career as a physician.

  Physicians have a unique way of looking at life. In medicine, we first diagnose the problem and then go about implementing the remedy based on facts, not preconceptions. I came to find that such linear thinking doesn’t happen all that often in the halls of Congress. We pass thousand-page bills no one has read. I work in a city where logic is the exception. We can’t even pass things we agree on. I couldn’t even get a vote on a bill that I cosponsored with Harry Reid. When I think of how screwed up Washington is, I think of a Groucho Marx quote. “The art of politics,” he said, “is looking for problems everywhere, finding them, misdiagnosing them, and applying the wrong remedies.”

  While members of Congress spend their time blowing hot air at one another across the aisle, the president and his administration make a mockery of
the separation of branches as defined in the Constitution. There is likely no greater problem we face than the executive branch usurping power that was assigned to the legislative branch. In some ways Congress is to blame, as Congress leaves the power it’s supposed to assume lying around on the ground for the president to just vacuum up.

  Still, this president has gone further to collapse the separation of powers than any of his predecessors. If the executive branch can initiate war, if it can detain citizens without a trial, if it can amend legislation, if it can declare Congress to be in recess, then government unrestrained by law becomes nothing short of tyranny. The president is blunt about it. He opines that Congress won’t act, so he must. He has “his pen and his phone” and he will simply ignore Congress, never mind the Constitution. First he amended Obamacare without congressional action, then he amended immigration law without Congress’s approval, and then he proceeded to fight another war in the Middle East without congressional authority. He has broken his own promises—those he ran on as a presidential candidate—by expanding warrantless NSA surveillance of cell phone records, and he has ignored due process of law by ordering extrajudicial drone strikes that kill suspected terrorists, including American citizens. I worry that, as the separation of powers collapses, the law will become unrestrained, arbitrary, and will eat away at our freedoms. We already live in a time when unelected bureaucrats write most of the laws. Tens of thousands of pages of laws are written by officials from an alphabet soup of agencies: OSHA, EPA, IRS, USDA, and the list goes on. Meanwhile, one truth remains: Congress never voted on any of these laws, nor did the president sign them.

  I began my filibuster in the hope of sounding an alarm from coast to coast. The administration had already killed an American citizen with a drone without first charging him and, worse, was ambiguous over whether it would conduct such an egregious act against the Constitution on American soil. I asked that question at the beginning of my filibuster, but it took the White House nearly thirteen hours to answer it. As the minutes, then hours, of my filibuster went by, I was fueled by the thought of an outraged citizenry and I knew my filibuster meant much more than just blocking Brennan’s nomination.

  Yes, I was standing for due process of law. Yes, I was standing for the right to a trial by a jury. But I also stood for a United States that doesn’t spy on its own citizens, a United States where a person’s home and records are private, where law enforcement needs a warrant to enter a home or search your records. I stood for a United States that despises the idea of encroachment on personal liberty.

  I stood for a United States that requires its president to obey the Constitution.

  That America doesn’t allow the bipartisan looting of the Treasury, the bipartisan destruction of our currency, and the bipartisan sprint away from a republic limited by a constitution to a democracy limited only by majority rule. In that America, Congress decides when to go to war.

  In that America, the Bill of Rights isn’t so much for the American Idol winner, the prom queen, or the high school quarterback as it is for the least popular among us, especially for minorities—whether that person belongs to a minority by virtue of skin color or a shade of ideology. You can be a minority because you live in a poor neighborhood or because you choose to teach your children at home.

  That’s the America I stood for.

  I had no idea what was going on outside the Senate chamber during my filibuster. I was allowed only to talk and listen to questions. If I stopped speaking for more than thirty seconds or sat down, I would lose the floor. I could only monopolize the floor as long as I kept standing. I wasn’t even allowed to keep the thermos and apple. Unlike what is depicted in the filibuster scene in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, food and drink are prohibited in the real Senate chamber.

  When I started to walk around to loosen up my legs, Senator Ted Cruz arrived at the chamber and read some of the tweets that were coming in, the first time such an occurrence had happened on the Senate floor, where cell phones are not allowed. From those tweets I discovered that I wasn’t alone, that the Bill of Rights was not a lost cause, and that millions of Americans—Republicans, Democrats, and Independents—were excited to have someone stand up for the right of every American of whatever origin, black or brown, Arab or Jew or Christian, to be tried by a jury of his or her peers. To the surprise of official Washington, the Twitterverse exploded in agreement.

  Not until the next day did I find out the extent to which my filibuster had influenced social media: there had been something like a million tweets with the hashtag #StandWithRand.

  America’s sense of justice was awakened, and millions of citizens—from all political viewpoints—were suddenly demanding answers. Finally, after thirteen hours and a million tweets, Eric Holder responded to the simple question I had posed at the beginning: “Does the president have the authority to kill an American citizen not engaged in combat, on American soil, with a drone?”

  His answer: “No.”

  In the chapters that follow, you will learn some things about me that might surprise you. I’m not, for instance, the carbon-copy conservative of your grandfather’s GOP. I want a New GOP that resonates with America, that looks like America—white and black, rich and poor, with tattoos and without. I want the New GOP to, once again, be the champion of individual rights. I believe that the reason the Republican Party hasn’t connected with minorities is because we haven’t tried hard enough, and I’m going to fight to change that.

  I believe the GOP brand is broken, that many young people and many people of color simply won’t even consider voting for or becoming a Republican. It’s time for change, and the first part of changing is admitting your mistakes. Remember when Domino’s Pizza finally admitted that it had bad crust? They got rid of the old crust and made a better pizza. I’m all for getting rid of the old crust in the Republican Party.

  In the pages ahead, you’ll find out about my journey to becoming a physician and how being a doctor defines me as a politician. You’ll find I’m a tree hugger, literally—just ask my neighbors who watched me trying to grow a variety of trees, including giant sequoias, in my yard. I’m a Republican who wants clean air, clean water, and the life-extending miracle of electricity. I compost. In fact, I built my composting bins from the remnants of an old tree fort I built for our kids. None of this is at odds with wanting our government to be smaller, with wanting our regulatory bodies to protect both our land and water—and our ability to create jobs and provide affordable power to our citizens. Too often this balance is portrayed as an either/or proposition.

  If you get to know me, you’ll find I am as independent of petty partisanship as you’ll find in Washington. I don’t care if you’re a Republican, a Democrat, or a Lilliputian. If you’ve got a good idea, I consider it. If I were president, I would analyze our problems and seek solutions regardless of party politics. I’ve sided with Democrats on civil liberties, and I’ve sided with Republicans on economic liberties. I’ve sided with Independents on reforming our criminal justice system. It took four years of lobbying, but I finally persuaded the Senate to sit down for a bipartisan lunch to be held regularly. Harry Reid even stood up at the first one last February and thanked me for not giving up on the idea. I’m predictably unbiased, and I consider that to be an asset.

  I’m also a man of peace through strength. I believe the defense of our country is a president’s first priority. I grew up as a Reagan Republican and believe that an unparalleled national defense is the greatest deterrent to war. Woe to those who would attack America or Americans on my watch—no matter where that happens in the world. But I also know there are too many of my colleagues who are far too eager for war. The decision to put boots on the ground always needs to be weighed against the enormous price that our soldiers have paid in life and limb during the long war in the Middle East and Afghanistan.

  Every decision must consider first the cost in human lives. Because, for me, far deeper than my political conviction is my faith
and my belief that we are all creatures of God, that human life is unique and should be protected, and that with life comes liberty—the two are indivisible. I believe that defense of personal liberty is the primary function of government. These beliefs provide an unshakable foundation that forms me as an American and as a man.

  My belief in God is as much a part of me as my love for my family. I know that people across this great country share this level of faith. It’s our secret weapon. When the president says we’re clinging to our guns and our religion, that’s my family and me. The elites may fly over us, but we still vote and we still believe in our God-given rights.

  Not for a minute do I believe that America’s best days are behind her. The challenges that we now face also provide an opportunity. I look to the horizon and see a future that is filled with hope and a people confident in their beliefs.

  Imagine a time when liberty is again spread from coast to coast.

  Imagine a time when our great country is again ruled by law.

  Imagine a time when our country is once again led by lovers of liberty.

  I see an America that is again innovative, self-reliant, and bold. I see an America worth taking a stand for.

  2

  A Medical History

  Sometimes the best discoveries are not only what you find, but what finds you.

  I was a sophomore in high school when I decided that I wanted to be a physician, like my father. Like any other kid, up until that point I had other priorities, not all of which were helpful. But once I found my calling, I began to pay more attention to my studies. I decided to read books outside and beyond what was required of me in school, and I asked my father if I could go with him into surgery at the hospital.

  I was fascinated by the technical skill and the confidence it took to open someone up, repair the problem, and put them back together again.