Rand Paul Filibuster: 'Your Rights Are Many and Infinite... You Do Have a Right to Privacy'
The Kentucky senator tells conservatives to respect the Ninth Amendment.
Damon Root | May. 21, 2015 10:52 am
Does the U.S. Constitution protect the right to privacy? Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) certainly thinks so. During the course of his 10-and-a-half hour filibuster yesterday to prevent the reauthorization of the Patriot Act, Paul repeatedly lambasted the federal government for its failures and refusals to safeguard the fundamental privacy rights of American citizens. “There is a general veil of suspicion that is placed on every American now,” Paul observed. “Every American is somehow said to be under suspicion because we’re collecting the records of every American.” It has to stop.
Paul’s staunch defense of privacy rights puts him at odds with many of his fellow conservatives. In fact, as I’ve previously noted, many conservatives believe the Constitution does not protect the right to privacy at all, since the word privacy is mentioned nowhere in the text of the Constitution. As the late conservative legal theorist Robert Bork once put it, there are no individual rights in those areas where “the Constitution has not spoken.”
During his filibuster yesterday, Paul tackled this conservative orthodoxy head on.
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