by Rand Paul
Since the Snowden revelations, there have been thousands of documented breaches of FISA rules by NSA analysts, including something they’ve dubbed LOVEINT, spy speak for “love intell.”20 Although the number of these transgressions was small, if you’re either an ex-lover or prospective love interest of an NSA analyst, you might want to watch what you say when you’re talking on your cell.
Out of all of the transgressions the government inflicted on the Fourth Amendment, maybe the worst was the NSA’s intrusion into our cyber lives. Call me old-school, but there once existed an element of trust between Internet users. Yes, I know, there have been scam artists and other misuses of personal data since the invention of the Internet, but nothing close to the scale perpetrated by the NSA. If you read the tech blogs and columns today, there is a real sense of dissatisfaction not only with the government but with the Internet-based companies that once held themselves to be above reproach, the ones that shouted they were changing the world for the better. As with all of these transgressions, it’s the average American who suffers.
American Internet companies are trying to restore confidence in their users.21 Google is now helping users code their own email and is laying its own fiber-optic cable on ocean floors to give them better control over their customers’ data. Apple phones now encrypt emails, photos, and contacts. Last year, when the iPhone 6 came out with this new technology, FBI director James B. Comey told the New York Times, “What concerns me about this is companies marketing something expressly to allow people to hold themselves beyond the law.”22
Though Mr. Comey keeps the request for the Dr. King wiretap on his desk as a reminder, he heads an agency with an extensive history of holding itself above the Constitution. Meanwhile, those “people” Comey talked about wouldn’t have felt it necessary if the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, hadn’t lied to the American people and told us that the government wasn’t collecting all of our data all of the time.
Meanwhile, the FBI and other federal agencies have already found ways to circumvent the encryption. One is the use of small planes equipped with “dirtboxes,” a device that mimics cell-phone towers and is able to track a suspect within three yards and can intercept data and text even from the iPhone 6.23
We’ve arrived at a strange moment in American politics where the government asks the public to view anyone who challenges its authority as wrong or traitorous, while simultaneously asking the public to ignore or accept intrusive behavior that a strong majority views as wrong. Are we now really supposed to vilify all whistle-blowers and trust government in everything it does?
In the South, it was once a crime for African Americans to drink from “whites only” water fountains. Civil disobedience in pursuit of higher purpose has taken place often in our country. Martin Luther King Jr. once said that there comes a time when you have to stop being a thermometer and start being a thermostat.
I’m not comparing Edward Snowden to Martin Luther King Jr. There are different opinions of Edward Snowden, the “Leaker” of classified NSA information. Some call him a risk taker. Others call him a traitor. Snowden’s “flight” to Russia didn’t help his standing in many Americans’ eyes. Though you have to question his destination, his actions are understandable. Years before there was an Edward Snowden, there was Diane Roark, a staffer for the House Intelligence Committee. It was Roark who was among the first to raise an alarm that the NSA was collecting data on Americans. But when she took her concerns to people she thought would be sympathetic—members of the intelligence committee, a Bush administration official, and even a FISA judge—she was stonewalled. The judge, in fact, reported her to the Justice Department. From that moment on, Roark lived the nightmare of being the target of the intelligence committee. She quit her job and moved to Oregon, where her home was subjected to both “sneak and peek” delayed warrant searches and warranted searches. She was grilled by the CIA and FBI and remained for years under their surveillance. Like many, she thought the election of Barack Obama meant a return to a constitutional rule of law, only to find out that the new administration was worse than its predecessor.24 In fact, the Obama administration has prosecuted more government leakers than all other administrations combined.25
But the bigger point isn’t whether Snowden was right or wrong. The bigger point is whether the NSA is.
The bigger point is the erosion of trust we have in government. James Clapper lied under oath to Congress. Yes, there need to be laws against leaking information that involve national security, but there are also laws against lying to and deliberately misleading the American people. Perhaps what makes Clapper’s dishonesty more dangerous than Snowden’s is that it comes within a series of lies and systematic lawlessness delivered by this administration: from the IRS scandal to Benghazi to the director of Intelligence and the NSA. Connect the dots and what appears on the page is frightening.
All those years ago, in the courtroom in Boston’s Province House, James Otis would lose his argument. Obviously, there were no fiber-optic cables in those days and so it would take a year and a half for the decision by the judges to make its way back to the Crown and then return to the colonies to be handed down.
But Otis only lost in a legal sense.
His fiery words echoed through the colonies. He had enunciated what most colonists felt: that they had the right to privacy, that the British government was overstepping its bounds. By virtue of being human they held these rights, which were given to them by God.
The rumble of Otis’s words wouldn’t die out. Over the next fifteen years they were evoked time and again. And each time they were, the fervor grew. But so did the Crown’s callous disregard of the colonists’ rights: the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts, and so on.
Then on a December evening in 1773 a group of Boston patriots took a stand. Dressed like Mohawk Indians, they boarded ships and threw chests of tea into the murky Boston Harbor.
It might not surprise you that the Boston Tea Party is one of my favorite moments in our fight for independence.
Nor should it surprise you that I consider James Otis and his burning defense of our right to privacy a fundamental moment in the forming of America’s character.
That character is what is sorely missing from our current administration. Repairing this is one of my top priorities.
7
On the Road
We don’t need new principles, we just need to stand by the ones we have.
When I spoke at Howard University here in D.C. in April 2013, I opened my talk at the traditionally black college by explaining that the Republican Party had historically been the party of civil and voting rights. Republicans were a driving force behind the civil rights bills of the Eisenhower and Kennedy eras, and Republicans had supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act at a much higher rate than Democrats in either chamber of Congress. In fact, the story of emancipation, voting rights, and citizenship from Frederick Douglass until the modern civil rights era is the history of the Republican Party.
My audience wasn’t impressed, to say the least. Though I was well received that day in general, and have been so many other times at historically black colleges around the country since, the lesson from that day stayed with me. My audience didn’t want or need a history lesson. They needed to know that I understood the problems of the community.
How was my party’s past a remedy for the intractably high unemployment rate among African Americans, they wondered. How did it aid an educational system that continues to fail inner-city communities? How was it a cure for mandatory minimum sentencing and other racially biased outcomes of the war on drugs?
What did Republican ancient history have to do with the problems African Americans still face?
They had a point.
Luckily, I’d come to Howard, the first Republican to do so in quite a while, with more than just some dusty old references. I also came with a message and a plan. And I came to listen.
I believe at its root the Repub
lican Party, at least the Republican Party that I embrace, stands for self-reliance and individualism, both of which are the cornerstones of the proud tradition of African Americans. I also know my party has let the bond it once enjoyed with minorities fray to the point that it is nearly beyond repair.
I don’t believe it’s beyond repair.
What I believe is that the Republican Party needs to bring our civil rights agenda into the twenty-first century. We need to be the champions of voting rights restoration, sentencing reform, and school choice.
Voting rights are a good example of how a love of liberty and respect for the Constitution should work to reverse destructive policies from the past few decades. Currently, if you serve prison time for a felony—even a nonviolent one—you lose many of your rights, even after you have paid your debt and return to society. You often cannot vote, have a hard time getting a job, and encounter many obstacles to starting over as a good citizen.
We should take the opposite approach. When a person has served the time for their crime, they should be encouraged to become an active, productive member of society again. It’s not only the morally right thing to do, but has the added benefit of preventing a return to crime and prison.
One way we let these individuals know that they are welcome back into society is to allow them to vote again. Denying a citizen his or her constitutional rights after they have served their prison sentence is unjust. I am proud to have championed this reform in both my home state of Kentucky and through federal law.
We must recognize that, for many people, issues such as voting rights, sentencing reform, and the inability to escape failing schools through school choice are not debates going on in a think tank. They are not committee hearings with scholars and talking points. This is real life for far too many Americans.
I was repeatedly reminded of this when I held school choice forums around the country, but especially in Louisville, Kentucky. I have attended school choice events and charter school functions in the West End of Louisville for years. The citizens who live in the West End are predominately black and low-income. Their schools face a host of challenges, which I wanted to better understand and help find solutions for.
Time after time, when I took questions after a school choice forum, the issue of the restoration of civil and voting rights for felons would arise. I was struck by how often the questions were raised, and how problematic this issue was for so many people.
One father told me that he could not go to watch his children perform in their school plays because of laws restricting felons from school property. This man, who has paid his debt to society, now wants nothing more than to be a supportive and involved father to his children. Obviously we need laws to protect our kids, but we must consider the unintended outcomes of some of these laws—and how they affect individuals, families, and communities.
That is why I’ve chosen to stand with those who want nothing more than a better school—and eventually a better life—for their kids. It’s why I’ve chosen to stand, against most political advice, with those who want their voting and other rights back after they have served their debt to society. And it’s why I’ve chosen to stand with those for whom our criminal justice system has forgotten the part about justice.
We need to address the inequity of the war on drugs and the contentious relationship that still exists between law enforcement and the black community.
These are among the issues that the audience at Howard University cares about. Our country—and the GOP—needs to better address these issues.
Right now, the Republican brand sucks. I promised Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, that I would stop saying the GOP sucks, and I will (except for this last time). But both Reince and I know that the same old begets the same old. I believe the Republican Party and minorities have common ground. The Republican Party can rightly serve minority communities if we stay true to our core, be open to new ideas, and boldly profess what we believe.
People say that in order for the Republicans to win back the minority vote they have to be more like Democrats, maybe even “Democrat lite.”
I vehemently disagree.
Not only do I know that Republicans share core beliefs with minority communities, I think our policies will succeed where the Democrat policies have failed. Democrats do a lot of talking about poverty and income inequality but, by nearly every measurement, poverty and income inequality are worse under Democrat rule.
Study after study1 shows that federal assistance does not reduce poverty. Today, after six years of the Obama administration’s policies, one in six Americans lives in poverty, more than at any other time in the past several decades. In fact, despite the uptick in the economy, the poor have only grown poorer in the past six years. Black unemployment is at 14 percent, nearly twice the national average.
The objective evidence shows that big government is not a friend to minorities. Big government relies on the Federal Reserve to print money out of thin air, which only leads to higher prices. When the cost of food, tuition, and home repair skyrocket, it’s a direct result of our national debt, the million dollars we borrow each minute. Inflation hurts everyone, but particularly the poor and those who are struggling. If getting new brakes for your car causes personal financial collapse, something is very wrong.
I get it, though. What the Republicans offer is less tangible than a government check. The promise of equalizing opportunity through free markets, lower taxes, and fewer regulations doesn’t arrive in a mailbox at the first of the month, but it does reside in a life-changing future, a future in which the disadvantaged have the opportunity to break the bonds of poverty.
I know it’s not going to be easy for the Republican Party to win the trust of African Americans, Latinos, and other minorities. If you are struggling to get ahead, if you have school loans and personal debt, if you’re sick and tired of living month to month, maybe you should think about voting for someone who wants to leave more money in the private sector so that when you look for a job, there just might be one there for you.
According to the NAACP, if current trends continue, one in three black men will spend some time in prison.2 In Washington, D.C., 57 percent of high school students drop out. In Baltimore the rate is 62 percent, and in Detroit more than 78 percent of students don’t graduate from high school. These statistics are staggering. But they are also part of an abysmal record of failure on the part of Democrat policies: the ten poorest major cities in America have been under exclusive Democrat control for decades, many since the sixties.3
I remember reading Dr. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and learning of his nonviolent strategy of civil disobedience and realizing how he really understood the idea of just laws. “One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws,” he wrote.
Dr. King knew things wouldn’t change by inches. To wait for policy and public opinion meant the slow, agonizing death of his cause. He knew that change had to be seismic, a tectonic shift in the plates of the Earth’s mantle. He knew that only through civil disobedience would this occur. Rosa Parks, those brave men and women on the bridge in Selma, and the students who sat at the lunch counters were the silent soldiers in this assault on inequality.
But the assault on inequality continues, as evidenced by the color of the population of our jails, the hopelessness of the unemployed and dependent, and the heartbreaking failure of our inner-city schools. My message to the audience at Howard, and in Chicago, and Atlanta, and other venues where I speak to those of all races and backgrounds, is that my Republican Party, the Republican Party I hope to lead to the White House, is willing to change.
Saying you’re going to change is one thing, but actually changing takes a lot more than words.
On the Road
From Howard, I set off to travel the country. I began my discovery tour in the West End of Louisville.
Like most inner-city neighborhoods, the West End has both a vibrant cultural history and one
of racial strife. It was the boyhood home of Muhammad Ali—an avenue there bears his name. It’s also the home of Shawnee Park, a two-hundred-acre oasis designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who also designed Central Park in New York City. Samuel Plato, the renowned architect and graduate of Simmons College, designed and built many of the houses and churches in the historic section of the West End. He was the first African American architect to be given a government contract, and he went on to build thirty-eight post offices around the country.
But much of the vibrancy of the West End was drained as factories closed and jobs moved overseas. One of the major employers of the neighborhood, Philip Morris, closed its tobacco plant in 2000. The unemployment rate in this Louisville neighborhood is now 16.4 percent.
I started going to the West End during my senate campaign and then, after I was elected, visited in an official capacity. It was in those early trips that I first met Reverend Kevin Cosby, the longtime pastor of St. Stephen Baptist Church. He likes to say he’s been at St. Stephen’s “since the days when Abraham Lincoln was a precinct captain.” Pastor Cosby is a brilliant public speaker. His sermons soar to legendary heights, but they come from a street-level perspective. From our meetings I learned of his passion for bringing higher education to the West End and his mission to reaccredit the historically black Simmons College. Reverend Cosby donates his time and salary to that wonderful institution of higher learning. In our conversations, I told him how I wanted to reform draconian drug sentencing policies that have filled our prisons with people of color. Over the course of our friendship he has said some very kind things about me, including this quote: “I have heard no national politician speak on the substantive issues that affect African Americans like Senator Rand Paul.”4 I carry those words as a badge of honor.