RAND PAUL ON HOW LIBERTARIAN PHILOSOPHY CAN CONNECT DIVIDED PARTISANS
STEVE HARTSOE
NOVEMBER 9, 2018
What should we expect from Congress between January and the presidential election in 2020, now that Democrats have won back the House?
Not much, according to one U.S. senator.
“I think very little will happen,” said U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky who spoke Friday at the Sanford School. “I think Democrats will bring forth initiatives in the House and they will die in the Senate.”
Paul, who earned his medical degree from Duke in 1988 and has a son who’s a sophomore here, also talked about how his fellow Republicans can work more productively with Democrats.
For one, Paul, a Libertarian-leaning Republican, said he favors a form of compromise that’s not defined based on your party.
Paul said he agrees with liberals on a number of issues, including: war (“I’m as anti-war as you can get”); relaxed criminalization for drug offenses (“There is a racial disparity in drug policy and we should do something about it”); less government eavesdropping on Americans in the name of fighting terrorism; and not allowing a U.S. citizen to be held indefinitely as an enemy combatant without a trial.
“As a Libertarian I can talk with the far left about war, drug policy … not about guns and taxes,” he said to laughter.
Most of the compromising in Washington involves too much shared back-scratching: the left gets its welfare spending so the right can get its military spending, he said.
He believes the main role of government is to protect liberty, not provide broadband in rural areas, for instance. “Private enterprise will take care of that,” Paul said. “I think we should really self-examine what government is.”
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