Taking a Stand

by Rand Paul

  Though a towering figure of American history, Henry is not my favorite Clay. That distinction goes to his cousin Cassius Marcellus Clay, the nineteenth-century abolitionist. Cassius Clay had a falling out with his more prominent cousin when he released a private letter that Henry had written to him that seemed to support the end of slavery. Henry denied having written it, and he never spoke to Cassius again.

  For his part, Cassius was unapologetic. In Lexington, Kentucky, two brass cannons and a collection of friends stood guard over his abolitionist press, True American. He is known to have fought and won at least six duels in his life. In the Heidler biography, Cassius is described as a man whose weapons of choice where his pen and his Bowie knife. He was so adept with the first, the biographers write, that he often had to resort to the latter. He prepared for speeches by placing his Bible on one side of the lectern and his Bowie knife on the other.

  One night, Cassius was ambushed by a slave trader named Squire Turner and his sons, and his big Bowie knife saved his life. According to Blacks in Appalachia, edited by Appalachian historians William H. Turner and Edward J. Cabbell, the event boiled over after both men began targeting each other with invectives and derisive remarks. When Turner’s boys approached Clay, the abolitionist tried to draw his knife but was clubbed on the head and the Bowie was pulled from his hand. Squire Turner’s son Thomas then aimed a six-shot pistol point-blank at Cassius Clay’s face and pulled the trigger three times. The gun misfired on each attempt. Clay wrested the Bowie knife from one of Thomas’s brothers but almost cut his own fingers “to the bone,” according to the biographers. During the struggle for the knife, Clay was stabbed just above his heart.2 Blind with fury, he managed to wrest free the Bowie and retaliated by “burying the knife to the hilt” into the abdomen of Thomas Turner’s brother Cyrus, killing him.3

  In 1866, Cassius donated land and money to found Berea College in Kentucky, the first school of higher education that was open to African Americans. Berea, the town, is nestled in the hills of Appalachia and was founded by abolitionists. It takes its name from the Bible, a place where St. Paul went to escape persecution. The Bible tells us that the people of Berea were truth seekers and welcomed Paul’s teaching of Christ. In its first academic year, Berea College’s enrollment totaled 187 students, 96 of whom were African American.

  As I sat at Henry Clay’s desk in my early days in the Senate, I was mindful that compromise may be necessary to govern. Compromise can and should occur when policy is headed in the right direction. Though I might have been mindful of Henry Clay, I must admit there is a place in my heart for his cousin Cassius, for the steadfastness of his principles, and the courage to fight for what he believed in.

  In my first 100 days, I was eager to get started, but the powers that be told me to keep my head down, my mouth shut, and put in my time to learn the way things were done in the Upper Chamber. After all, Hillary Clinton had done that, they said, and it had worked out fine for her, right? It has worked well for every new senator since time immemorial, they told me. Perhaps, but it seemed to me the Senate hadn’t been working well at all for the people it was supposed to serve.

  When I was sworn in to the Senate in 2011, unemployment had been hovering between 9 and 10 percent for nearly two years, lives had been ruined, and hundreds of thousands of jobs lost. Standard & Poor’s was just about to downgrade our country’s credit for the first time in history.

  The federal budget had been operating at a $1 trillion yearly deficit or more for three years running. In addition, we’d spent over $3 trillion in stimulus by the government through the Federal Reserve, and we were adding to our $17 trillion debt at the rate of more than a million a minute.

  But as I raised my voice in protest I could hear it echo through the Senate chamber. Don’t cause a ruckus, now, I was advised.

  These things take time, they said.

  It was time for these things to change, I replied.

  My first order of business was a plan that addressed out-of-control federal spending and the budget.

  First, my proposal sought to roll back discretionary spending and then initiate reductions at various levels nearly across the board. So what does that mean? Well, specifically, it meant big cuts to agency bureaucracies that had become so bloated they nearly blot out the sun. Cuts to the Departments of Agriculture and Transportation would create over $42 billion in savings each, while cuts to the Departments of Energy and Housing and Urban Development would save about $50 billion each. Rescuing education from the federal government’s jurisdiction and giving it to state and local governance would not only improve the system, but would create almost $80 billion in savings alone.

  I also proposed reductions in other federal agencies and policies. Some worried about the loss of government jobs, but the money doesn’t disappear. It’s redirected into the private sector, creating more jobs—jobs not funded by the taxpayer. These cuts also expand individual freedom by removing unnecessary government controls.

  The cuts totaled $500 billion.

  Not surprisingly, my proposal was greeted skeptically even by my own party. Some were shocked. “What temerity!” they said. But back home, when I told the folks who had voted me into office, they said: “Well, that’s all well and good, but what do you intend to do about the $17 trillion debt?” I love it. In Washington, they can’t conceive of reducing the annual deficit, much less attacking the debt, and at home the people are ready and eager to attack both deficit and debt.

  Like any senator worth his license plate, I listened to the voices from home and not the ones that hushed me on the Hill. I went about setting my sights on the big bloated elephants that the rest of Washington tiptoes around. In an op-ed I wrote at the time for the Wall Street Journal, I used the Commerce Department as an example. It has been consistently labeled for elimination, specifically by House Republicans during the 1990s. One of Commerce’s main functions is delivering corporate welfare to American firms that can compete without it. Corporate welfare is a pet peeve of mine. More than a hundred billion dollars has been handed over to rich companies that don’t need it. Think of it like this: imagine the richest person you know. Now imagine giving that person your rent or mortgage money for no discernibly good reason. When you boil it down, that’s exactly what the government is doing with corporate welfare.

  My proposal would have scaled back the Commerce Department’s spending by 54 percent and would have eliminated corporate welfare altogether. Spending is out of control, and dramatic moves are necessary if only to drown out the nonsense that takes up so much of the discussion.

  People who say there is nowhere to cut in government, or that we should only be arguing about how much or how little the government should grow per year, simply aren’t getting the problem.

  Yes, we should be able to help people. Yes, we need a strong national defense and to preserve Social Security and Medicare. Yes, we should make sure our children have outstanding educations.

  Government right now does too much and exists to serve special interests in far too many cases. It operates inefficiently or with too much cronyism. Spending on programs such as corporate welfare and the Commerce Department are prime examples, but we have to make their elimination a priority, even a cause.

  When the media, the other side of the aisle, and even my own party accused me of being extreme I responded, “What’s extreme is trillion-dollar annual deficits and a nearly $18 trillion total debt.”

  How extreme?

  In his first address to a joint session of Congress, Ronald Reagan said a trillion dollars of debt would be “a stack of thousand-dollar bills 67 miles high.”4 Can you guess how high that would be in today’s debt dollars? Seventeen times 67 miles is 1,139 miles, or the altitude of some of our satellites.5 In thousand-dollar bills!

  Back here on Earth, the world is getting awfully crowded with people to whom the United States owes money, including $1.26 trillion to China, $250 billion to Brazil, $160 billion to Russia, over a trill
ion to Japan, and assorted billions to Belgium, Luxembourg, and Switzerland.

  Yet far too few of my colleagues seemed to be taking this looming catastrophe seriously.

  So while some were using talking points, my staff and I sat down and wrote the second part of my plan: a seventy-page budget that sought three main objectives: to cut spending further, reduce bloated government bureaucracy further, and bring the budget into balance in five years—all without raising taxes.

  In comparison, Paul Ryan’s budget, which got a lot of attention, was going to take nearly forty years to reach solvency. Sure, it was slightly better than Barack Obama’s budget, as the president’s would probably never balance. But anything would be better than that, as is evidenced by the fact that he couldn’t even get a single Democrat to vote for it in the Senate.

  I saw it like this: we could go stumbling around in the darkness of the Senate Chamber for the rest of recorded time, or someone could light a candle.

  Funny thing happened when I struck the match. Now, instead of the talk being about my temerity, I was beginning to gain some traction with my colleagues. Harry Truman once famously said: “If you can’t convince them, confuse them.” I confused them by doing my homework and producing a work of substance. My budget proposal got high marks from FreedomWorks, the Cato Institute, and even from the left’s flagship magazine, The Nation, which said I was “one of the few members of Congress who is contributing anything more than hype and hypocrisy to the current budget debate.”6

  One thing my budget proposals have made clear: Washington needs a lot more change. Some of it can come through a leader calling for that change, even if he doesn’t yet have enough people following to make it happen. While every Republican senator voted for a Constitutional amendment to balance the budget in five years, few were willing to actually vote for the specific cuts necessary to achieve that balance. Only a handful of my colleagues joined me, but our numbers are growing. As the debt keeps piling up, minds are starting to change. Each time I’ve introduced my budget, more Republicans have voted for it. So the debate is moving. The numbers are shifting.

  Representatives are starting to hear the voices of the outraged voters who cannot run their homes the way our government runs this country. I have no desire to endorse the status quo. I came to Washington to take stands like this. Exactly this stand, as a matter of fact.

  5

  A New Kind of Republican

  When I ran for office, my opponents claimed I wasn’t qualified because I had never held public office before. I responded that not being a career politician was precisely my strength and that we needed more doctors, teachers, businesspeople, barbers, accountants, and maybe fewer lawyers.

  One of the first calls I received after my election was from Al Franken congratulating me on my victory. Freshman senators are encouraged to ask one of their colleagues to be a mentor of sorts. So, I figured why not? I asked Senator Franken to be my mentor—how about that for a reach across the aisle? Al was gracious and truly helped me in my early days. In looking back, I should have taken his advice more to heart on at least one occasion. I was asked to appear on the David Letterman show after I published my first book, The Tea Party Goes to Washington.

  I went to Al and asked him for some jokes. “Don’t tell any jokes,” he said. “You’re not that funny.”

  My late night debut didn’t turn out that bad. Letterman asked me if my jeans were standard senatorial garb. I told him my wife said I shouldn’t wear them. He responded, “You should have listened to her.” For the most part, though, David didn’t get the memo that it was supposed to be late night comedy and insisted on engaging me in a debate. In the end he sort of just gave up and said, “I think he’s wrong about some of these things, I just can’t tell you why.”

  It was John McCain, though, who put the Senate in prospective for me during those early days. “For the first six months you’re going to pinch yourself and wonder how you got here,” he said. “For the rest of the time you’re going to wonder how the hell everybody else got here.”

  In my first four years in the Senate I have authored more than 100 bills. I wasn’t naming post offices, either. Right from the start, I set my sights on righting what is fundamentally wrong with the way our government works. I raised my share of eyebrows in the process.

  Term Limits

  Back in 1996, when my father was running for Congress again after a twelve-year hiatus spent practicing medicine, I attended a national medical meeting to see if I could find support for him with the medical PAC. Boy, was I naïve. When I approached a medical lobbyist with the idea, her response was direct, which is a nice way to categorize it. “We support people in power who can help us,” she said. “Like incumbents and committee chairmen.”

  “That’s exactly why we’re in this mess with trillion-dollar debts,” I responded. I brought up the name Rostenkowski. The longtime Democrat congressman from Chicago had just been sent to federal prison for, among other things, having at least fourteen people on his congressional payroll who did little or no official work. 1

  “Rostenkowski has always voted with us,” she said coolly.

  “That’s the problem,” I replied. Special interest groups support members of Congress who vote for their pet projects, to the detriment of the general welfare of the country. Rostenkowski always voted for higher fees for physicians, but he also voted for every deficit-spending package that came down the pike. Special interests were satisfied but the general interest of the nation was ignored.

  The Dan Rostenkowskis of Congress are the reason I believe one of the most important reforms necessary to take our government back is term limits. When I ran for office, my opponents claimed I wasn’t qualified because I had never held public office before. I responded that not being a career politician was precisely my strength and that we needed more doctors, teachers, businesspeople, barbers, accountants, and maybe fewer lawyers. I fully believe capable men and women who are not career politicians have the ability and insight to be legislators. In fact, what we really need in Congress is fresh perspective.

  The very first piece of legislation I introduced as a U.S. senator was an amendment to the Constitution to limit congressional terms of office. My amendment sought to limit legislators in the House to six two-year terms and in the Senate to two six-year terms. I believed then, and do now, that term limits would fundamentally transform Washington, taking it from the stagnant status quo to a vibrant agent for change. The Twenty-second Amendment limits the president to two terms, so why wouldn’t we want to limit legislative terms?

  Needless to say, my support for term limits hasn’t always helped me make friends in Washington. I remember that during my initial campaign the media would clamor and exclaim that my support of term limits was a direct affront to long-serving Mitch McConnell and Hal Rogers of Kentucky.

  I reminded them that my dad served for over twenty years, albeit not consecutively. I’m sure there are politicians who remain in office for years and years who don’t become jaded, sedentary, or abuse the power they’ve accrued. My father was one of them. I’ll never forget one story where the leadership was beseeching a Republican Congress to vote for a bloated budget full of pork. In front of the entire caucus the leader opined, “There’s something in this budget for every one of you and I expect a yea from every one of you—except Ron Paul, who votes no on principle.”

  Long terms of office increase the likelihood of apathy or the abuse of power for personal gain. The proof of this resides in a long and inglorious list: William Jefferson, Robert Nay, Randall “Duke” Cunningham, James Traficant, Austin John Murphy, and on and on. You don’t have to be a criminologist to figure out that term limits would eliminate much of the opportunity for elected officials to use their position to commit a crime. Limits would also consistently refill the halls of Congress with energetic people and new ideas, people who would get things done simply because they had only a limited time to do so. They wouldn’t be worn down by the s
teady drip of negativity that erodes character on Capitol Hill.

  I’m not alone in this fight, at least from a popular perspective. According to a recent Gallup poll, fully 75 percent of the public supports term limits.2 The grassroots group U.S. Term Limits has been fighting this battle for three decades now. According to their website, term limits have been placed on fifteen state legislatures, and eight of the ten largest cities in America have adopted term limits for their city councils and/or mayoral positions. Thirty-seven states place term limits on their constitutional officers. Several states even passed term limits on their representatives to the U.S. Congress. But the Supreme Court struck down those laws, arguing that eligibility for federal office must be uniform among the states.

  Nevertheless, there has been absolutely no movement on the Hill toward term limits. Why? The answer is easy. In order for it to become law, Congress would have to pass it. You think some old barnacled congressmen who’ve been around since the Hoover administration are going to vote for a bill that removes them from office? Not likely.

  If you don’t believe me, just look at the dearth of cosponsors for my Term Limits Amendment. At last count we had twelve.

  Does that mean that term limits are a dead issue? That Congress will never submit to the will of the people when it comes to term limits? Maybe not. There are a couple of other ways to enact term limits besides a straight congressional vote.

  The first is a constitutional amendment. The Constitution allows for amendments in two ways. The first way is by a two-thirds majority vote in both the House and Senate. Then the amendment is sent to the state legislatures for ratification. This is the process that has been used for all twenty-seven amendments to date. The second way, which has never been used, is when two-thirds of the state legislatures call for an Article V convention, which deliberates and passes the amendment. It then must pass by a three-fourths majority of the state legislatures. I think if enough state legislatures called for an Article V convention, Congress would do anything it could to prevent such a spectacle from occurring, including doing the right thing and finally passing amendments to require limited terms in office—and a balanced budget.