Rand Paul has a plan to influence the Trump administration. And it's working.
W. James Antle III
February 10, 2017
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is taking a lot of friendly fire from libertarians.
The big issue is Paul's vote to confirm Jeff Sessions as attorney general. "[H]ow does a drug war and mass incarceration critic vote for the Senate's most strident supporter of both… to run the DOJ?" asked The Washington Post's libertarian scribe Radley Balko.
Complicating things: While the Kentucky senator seemed to bend on Sessions, he was gearing up to oppose the hawkish Elliott Abrams if he was nominated for deputy secretary of state, just as Paul promised to do whatever it took to block Bush-era hawk John Bolton from either of the top two State Department jobs. (The Abrams point is now moot, as President Trump has personally nixed his nomination.)
But I must say: I think Paul's priorities here are correct.
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Trump is going to be a law-and-order president. (It's also worth noting that conservative support for criminal justice reform is dependent on relatively low crime rates that were not entirely secured by libertarian means.) But Trump doesn't have to be a hawkish president. Paul understands this, and is picking his spots to oppose and prod Trump accordingly.
As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Paul has more practical ability to stall or even circumvent nominees who would try to make the Trump foreign policy George W. Bush 2.0. But if Paul had voted against Sessions, the Alabama Republican would still have been confirmed. Paul would just have been the sole Republican on the side of Democrats who tried to assassinate Sessions' character.
Many libertarians don't like Paul's collegiality with more statist Republicans. But if you are going to work within the Republican Party, sometimes you've got to, well, work within the Republican Party.
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