The Ripon Society: The Ripon Forum- Gregory Koger: Preserve The Filibuster- Protect People From Political Parties

Source: The Ripon Society- Gregory Koger

Source: This piece was originally posted at The New Democrat

Before I get into the Republican hypocrisy about the Senate filibuster which is as loud as Metallica heavy metal concert unclose with no earplugs and as obvious as the Grand Canyon is big, I just want to get to the constitutional arguments about the Senate filibuster.

Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution grants all Federal legislative powers with Congress. Under the U.S. Constitution Congress writes their own rules. So the Senate decided to have a filibuster and cloture rule. The House decide to have an almost completely majoritarian framework in how they run their business. Which is both the right of the Senate and House of Representatives to write and enforce their rules the way they decide to. Whatever rules they make for themselves are constitutional. Its the laws that Congress passes together that are subjected to judicial rules by the Federal judiciary.

Now the more fun side of this debate. Where were GOP calls for eliminating the Senate filibuster and calling it unconstitutional the first two years of the Obama Administration when Democrats controlled Congress and even had 3/5 majorities in both the House and Senate? But under then Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and a few Senate Democrats as well, were still able to block some bills proposed and passed by House Democrats. Like extending Unemployment Insurance and additional stimulus bills to the economy. Senate Republicans were able to do this because they stayed inline and prevented Democrats from getting 3/5 majority vote in the Senate.

Or where was the GOP call to eliminate the filibuster from 2011-15 when there were two divided Congress’s because House Republicans won back the House in 2010 and held onto majority in 2012. With Senate Democrats keeping the Senate in 2010 and 2012? Senate Republicans with 47 and then later 45 members, were able to block a whole list of Obama Administration executive and later judicial appointments simply by preventing Senate Democrats from obtaining 60 votes. Which is why then Senate Leader Harry Reid eliminated the filibuster in 2013 on executive and judicial nominees.

There are very good reasons why Congress is more unpopular than traveling salesman, lawyers, trial lawyers and make conmen look like good decent moral people. One of those reasons is hypocrisy.

Members of Congress will say they believe in fiscal responsibility and even fiscal conservatism. Until they become fiscally responsible at least in the sense that they’re now in power and in control of the nation’s fiscal policy. They run against deficit spending when they’re in the opposition, especially when they’re in both the opposition and minority, which is where Republicans were in 2010 and 2011. And then whey come back into power which is where Republicans are now, deficits no longer seem to matter to them. Especially if they have political priorities and objectives and things they need to accomplish in order to get reelected in 2018.

Why try to pay for tax relief and tax reform and ask people to pay for those things with few government services, when you can just finance those things on the national credit card and get way with it, if they’re successful in passing it this year? Being in the political opposition is easy in the sense that you can complain all you want and not really pay any price for it. But governing is difficult because it means making decisions and risking offending groups that you may need to win reelection. Which is where the Trump Administration and Congressional Republicans find themselves now.

Republican complaints about the Senate filibuster today and Congress failing to move on anything because legislation getting blocked in the Senate, well their a couple of problems with that.

One, the House isn’t passing much if any legislation right now either. At least legislation that even Senate Republicans want to deal with. So maybe the GOP should look at their colleagues in the House when it comes to gridlock or their own Senate Leadership. But the second reason is more obvious and is nothing more than hypocrisy on a month long sugar high. The GOP was in favor of the filibuster when they were in the opposition, especially the opposition and minority, because they could use it to obstruct the Obama Administration and Congressional Republicans. Now they’re against it because they’re divided and can’t seem to find enough votes to even pass legislation with a simple majority, let alone a super majority. Opposition to the filibuster is nothing more than political hypocrisy at this point and a big example of why Americans hate politics and hate Congress.

Now This World: U.S. Senator Rand Paul

Now This World: Trace Dominguez- U.S. Senator Rand Paul: What Is a Filibuster?

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CNN: U.S. Senator Rand Paul- The Right to be Left Alone is The Most Precious

Source: This piece was originally posted at The New Democrat Plus

First of all, the Patriot Act is going to expire at midnight in less than two hours from the time this piece is posted, because of Senate Leader Mitch McConnell and his Neoconservatives in his caucus. They could’ve spent the last two weeks on either the USA Freedom Act. That was passed by the House with 388 votes. A huge bipartisan majority of Conservative Republicans and Liberal Democrats in the House.

Or, McConnell could’ve brought the version of the Patriot Act that he expires to the Senate floor. Opened it up to amendments from both sides. Including from Senator Rand Paul and Senator Ron Wyden and several other civil liberty minded Senators from both parties. Mike Lee, Pat Leahy, Jon Tester, Ron Johnson, Mark Heinrich and many others. What the Leader did instead, was to bring the Patriot Act up, knowing that he didn’t have sixty votes for it. And when that became reality, he decided to bring up an extension of the Patriot Act. To buy more time for the Senate to finally pass the bill. Translation, so he could lean on his own members to vote for a long-term bill. To keep the Patriot Act in place indefinitely.

McConnell, knows that if he opens up this debate to amendments, several of them will pass with bipartisan support. Civil liberties, is now a bipartisan issue in Congress. As we saw with the passage of the USA Freedom Act in the House and now with Senate Democrats and Republicans refusing to vote on the old Patriot Act. Because it doesn’t have those civil liberty protections when it comes to warrants. Under the Patriot Act, the government doesn’t need warrants to search people they see as suspicious. They don’t even need evidence, or at least share that evidence with a third-party. Senator Paul, Conservative Libertarian Republican and Senate Wyden, Liberal Democrat, both want the government to have to get warrants before they can search suspects. Which is really what the Fourth Amendment is all about. The protection from unreasonable searches and seizures.

The USA Freedom Act, certainly not perfect, but certainly an improvement over the original Patriot Act. And the Senate, could’ve spent the past two weeks debating the bill and voting on amendments and improving it. So the U.S. Government could protect both our liberty and our security. So the innocent are protected from unreasonable searches and seizures. And government could investigate and prosecute real criminals and terrorists. Under the U.S. Constitution for one and the USA Freedom Act. But no! Thats not good enough for Leader Mitch McConnell. Give him a two-week extension of the old Patriot Act, that the House Republican Leadership has already said they won’t pass. Or give him the original Patriot Act without the new civil liberties protections. Which won’t pass the House, or Senate either.

CNN: U.S. Senator Rand Paul- The Right To Be Left Alone is The Most Precious

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The Dish: Opinion: Andrew Sullivan: Why Rand Paul Matters: Senator Paul’s Critique of President Reagan’s Fiscal Policy

U.S. Senator Rand Paul

The Dish: Opinion: Andrew Sullivan: Why Rand Paul Matters

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This post was originally posted at The New Democrat on Blogger

For me, though, these clips make Paul’s candidacy more appealing, not less. What the GOP needs is an honest, stringent account of how it has ended up where it is – a party that has piled on more debt than was once thought imaginable and until recently, has done nothing much to curtail federal spending. Reagan was a great president in many ways, as Paul says explicitly in these clips.

But Reagan introduced something truly poisonous into American conservatism.

It was the notion that you can eat your cake and have it too, that tax cuts pay for themselves and that deficits don’t matter. This isn’t and wasn’t conservatism; it was a loopy utopian denial of math. And the damage it has done to this country’s fiscal standing has been deep and permanent. It is one of modern conservatism’s cardinal sins. And Paul is addressing it forthrightly – just as he is addressing the terrible, devastating consequences of neo-conservatism for America and the world in the 21st Century.

What we desperately need from the right is this kind of accounting. It’s what reformers on the left did in the 1990s – confronting the failures of their past in charting a new future. Taking on Reagan on fiscal matters may be short-term political death, as Corn suspects and maybe hopes, but it is vital if the GOP is to regain some long-term credibility on the core question of government solvency. Compared with the ideological bromides and slogans of so many others, Rand Paul is a tonic. And a courageous one at that.

The New Democrat

I really respect Senator Rand Paul and love Andrew Sullivan (you know platonically) because of their damned straight honesty and forthrightness.  Andrew, on his blog, The Dish, today compared the supply side economics of the Reagan and G.W. Bush administrations with the overreach of the Democratic Party at the time of the emergence of the New Left in America. The base of that party became so radical in the late 1960s and 1970s that it gave liberalism and Liberals a bad name.  It took Bill Clinton ,in the early 1990s, to bring the Democratic Party back to Earth, so to speak, and make it a center-left party again.

Senator Rand Paul was speaking the plain truth when he said that President Jimmy Carter had a better, more responsible and conservative fiscal record than President Ronald Reagan.  President Carter had a balanced budget as one of his goals and he pushed that throughout his presidency. He had a very rough economy and never got there but it wasn’t because of the overspending of his administration or the Congress.  It was because of the bad economy of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

President Reagan abandoned the goal of a balanced Federal budget by 1984 in late 1981 or early 1982 when his Economic Recovery Act became law.  He was getting intelligence reports about the U.S.S.R. and the mess its economy was in.  Perhaps he got the idea that this would be the time to end the Cold War and put the Soviet Union out of business.  That meant building up the Defense Department in an attempt to bring the Russians to their knees so that they had to negotiate with the U.S. in order to survive economically.

The fact is that our last fiscally conservative president was George H.W. Bush who was no radical,  right or left.  He had a pretty conservative fiscal policy and a tight monetary policy.  Without the 1990 Deficit Reduction Act that he negotiated with a Democratic Congress we wouldn’t have reached the balanced budget in 1998 that we did. President Gerald Ford is probably the most fiscally conservative president we’ve ever had as far limiting what the Federal Government would do and spend.  It is not Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush.  They were both supply side borrowers and spenders.

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The Daily Beast: Jonathan Miller: ‘ObamaCare is Winning in Kentucky Thanks to Steve Beshear’

Source:The Daily Beast– From left to right: Governor Steve Beshear, (Democrat, Kentucky) U.S. Senator Rand Paul (Republican, Kentucky) and U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Republican, Kentucky,

“We stuck with the Union in favor of our favorite son, Lincoln, but then joined in common cause with the Confederacy after the Civil War had ended. A century later, we boasted some of the nation’s most progressive civil rights laws; yet, to this date, we still feature many of America’s most segregated societies. And while Kentucky’s been one of the largest beneficiaries of the New Deal/Great Society welfare state, the dominant strain in our politics remains a fierce anti-government, anti-tax worldview.

Kentucky’s perplexing and hypocritical aversion to big government has been exploited brilliantly by our senior senator Mitch McConnell, who’s capitalized on our cultural resentment of elite interference to transform the Bluegrass State into a deep-red citadel in federal elections. More recently, our junior senator Rand Paul catapulted McConnell’s vision much further than Mitch intended, placing Kentucky in the crosshairs of the Tea Party revolution. But while these two political icons and their surrogates clash over the depth of government slashing, they’ve been steadfastly united behind one common vision: the defeat, and, more recently, the repeal of the Affordable Care Act.

It’s no coincidence then that Obamacare is beginning to expose the political fault line that divides the two Kentuckys. The GOP’s effective—and quite misleading—messaging plays into the anti-establishment populace’s greatest fears about out-of-control outside interference: the myth of a government-run-health-care system, engineered by a President with socialist tendencies (and whose skin pigmentation and exotic name frankly heighten popular anxiety in some of the nation’s least educated counties). And yet, when you wade through the propaganda and understand the law’s true impact, Kentucky needs the Affordable Care Act…desperately. It’s a state consistently ranked near the bottom of nearly every national health survey, where one out of every six citizens remains uninsured.

With our long-standing tradition of timid politicians fearful of incurring the wrath of the anti-government mobs, it wouldn’t have been surprising to see Kentucky join much of Red America and reject both Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion to the working poor, as well as its option of establishing a state-run health benefit exchange to provide affordable health care to the remaining uninsured.

But in a delicious irony, Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul’s home state may ultimately serve as the proving ground of Obamacare’s success. That’s due to the political chutzpah of one man: Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear.

Over the past several months, Beshear used his broad executive powers to bypass resistance from the GOP-controlled state Senate to ensure that the Commonwealth is the only Southern state that both expanded its Medicaid rolls and opened up a health benefit exchange, providing access to affordable health care to our more than 640,000 uninsured citizens. And while the federal launch of the program has been plagued with technical difficulties, Kentucky’s experience has been exemplary: In its first day, 10,766 applications for health coverage were initiated, 6,909 completed and 2,989 families were enrolled. Obama himself bragged that Kentucky led the nation with its glitch-minimized performance.

It would be hyperbolic to crown Steve Beshear as a profile in courage. The Governor’s second and final term expires in two years, and he’s made clear that this is his last political hurrah. However, Beshear is keenly interested in the political prospects of his son Andy—the betting favorite in the 2015 race for Attorney General—and he understands that even a tangential connection to the unpopular Obama carries a heavy political burden. Furthermore, the Governor isn’t quietly going about the business of administering the new law: Beshear has been gleefully poking the eye of the Tea Party beast — and its subservient U.S. Senators—and channeling Harry Truman in the national media circuit: In a recent New York Times op-ed, Beshear crowed: “[T]o those more worried about political power than Kentucky’s families, I say, ‘Get over it’…and get out of the way so I can help my people. Here in Kentucky, we cannot afford to waste another day or another life.”

From The Daily Beast 

I’m not a mindreader (obviously) but if I had to guess I would say that the hyper-partisan, right-wing base of the Republican Party hates the Affordable Care Act (also known as ObamaCare) but I don’t think that’s who they really hate or what they really hate.

What the right-wing in America really hates is President Barack Hussein Obama, who the Far-Right of the party, which might be the dominant faction in the Republican Party, sees as an Un-American, Muslim-Socialist, from Kenya, who represents everything that they hate about modern America. And now that President Obama has ObamaCare on his legacy, that adds 20 million Americans to the health insurance roles in this country, they hate him even more.

Again, I’m no mindreader, but had a President John McCain got the Affordable Care Act or McCainCare (as it would’ve been called) and gotten the exact same law that President Obama gotten through a Democratic Congress in 2009-10, you wouldn’t see the Republican Party, even with a Republican House trying to repeal the ACA today. The Republican right-wing’s opposition to ObamaCare, is really about Barack Obama, not as much as the law itself.

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Mox News: CNN Crossfire- ‘The Strength of The Assad Regime in Syria’

“We’ve Also Seen An Islamic Rebel Eating The Heart Of A Soldier!” CNN Crossfire: The Strength of The Assad Regime in Syria”

From Mox News

The fact is that without the serious threat of military force in Syria against the Assad Regime, Russia and Syria aren’t talking about negotiating and giving up the Syrian chemical weapons. That Russia and Syria took that threat serious enough to actually do something about it and not play chicken. Which is why now the Obama Administration is now listening to them and a real peaceful resolution may emerge. But I wouldn’t keep my fingers crossed (unless that makes you feel better) because President Bashar Al-Assad may just be trying to stall and buy more time.

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Senator Rand Paul: ‘Foreign Relations Hearing on The Crisis in Egypt’

Source:Senator Rand Paul– U.S. Senator Rand Paul (Republican, Kentucky) at the Foreign Relations Committee.

“Sen. Rand Paul at Foreign Relations Hearing on the Crisis in Egypt – 7/25/13”

From Senator Rand Paul

At risk of being in need of a head examination (as early as tomorrow) I completely agree with everything that Senator Rand Paul said here about Egypt and our giving foreign aid to authoritarian regimes and dictators.

I have a theory that it’s not the individual freedom that Arabs and Middle Easterners, including in Egypt hate about America, including the freedom that our women and minorities have here, but it’s the fact that we literally subsidize with American tax dollars the dictators in those countries.

I’m not saying your average Egyptian and anyone else in Arabia is a freedom-loving person, because I don’t think we can know that. And I know the counter-argument from the other side from internationalists and hawks arguing that if we don’t subsidize these dictators, those regimes will fall because they won’t have the money and other resources to stay in power because they’re unpopular and will be replaced by a regime that’s even worst and less cooperative with America and would subsidize terrorists that want to hit America.

But the reason why we get the terrorism that we do, is American taxpayers by force from their government, subsidize these unpopular Arab dictators and their regimes. So how does that make us safer?

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New York Magazine: Jonathan Chait- ‘Why Rand Paul Distrusts Democracy’

Source:New York Magazine– U.S. Senator Rand Paul (Republican, Kentucky

“The most unusual and interesting line in Julia Ioffe’s highly interesting profile of Rand Paul is Paul’s confession, “I’m not a firm believer in democracy. It gave us Jim Crow.” Of course, that’s an awfully strange way to condemn Jim Crow, which arose in the distinctly undemocratic Apartheid South (it was no coincidence that the dismantling of Jim Crow and the granting of democratic rights to African-Americans happened simultaneously). But it’s not just a gaffe or another historical misrepresentation — rather, it’s an authentic clue into an ideology Paul has been busily concealing as he has ascended into mainstream politics.”

Read the rest at New York Magazine

“Rand Paul: Woodrow Wilson’s ‘Spreading Democracy Throughout the World’ is a Failed Policy. Support a Constitutional Republic and Limited Government.”

From Vision Liberty

Just to respond to Senator Rand Paul’s speech about democracy and you can take Jonathan Chait’s speech about him for whatever you believe it’s worth:

Senator Paul was essentially arguing that you don’t want a democracy, but you want a republic. Well, how are the leaders of this republic supposed to get hired and get the jobs to govern for us and stay in power? Most, if not the entire developed world has one form of a democratic system or another and a lot of those countries are also republics. Just look at America or Germany, France, Italy, Poland, etc.

If Senator Paul were to say something like: “Oh, I believe in democracy and want the people to elect their leaders.” Then he is essentially saying that he believes in democracy as well.

There are all types of democracies, as well as republics. What hyper-partisans like the Rand Paul’s of the world don’t bother to mention, is that all of the republics in the developed world are democracies. Republican is not a form of government and neither is democratic.

There are authoritarian republics like in Russia and in the Middle East. China in the Far East. And you have democratic republics like in America and in Europe. The question is if you are a republic, what kind of republic are you: democratic or authoritarian? And a country like the Islamic Republic of Iran which is not part of the developed, first word, they’re both democratic and authoritarian. They elect their leaders, but their personal freedom and individual rights are fairly limited. The same thing with Turkey.

And to talk about Senator Paul’s comments about Jim Crow: what he didn’t bother to mention (and yes, I think he knows better) is that the Democrats who supported segregation and Jim Crow 50-100 years ago, were right-wing Neo-Confederate Democrats. When Rand Paul ran for the Senate in 2010, he was rumored to be a Neo-Confederate Republican, partially because he opposes the civil rights laws of the 1960s. So I don’t think this is a subject and debate that Senator Paul seriously wants to get into with just half the truth, because he could get seriously boomeranged on this.

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Salon: Steve Kornacki: ‘Is Rand Paul The Next Robert Taft?’

Source:Washington Monthly– U.S. Senator Rand Paul (Republican, Kentucky)

Source:The Daily Times

“When Rand Paul was announced as the winner of the Republican presidential straw poll at CPAC over the weekend, there was no chorus of boos from the assembled conservatives, a far cry from the response when his father won the same event a few years ago. Unlike Ron Paul, whose political coalition existed as much outside the Republican Party as in it and whose numerous straw poll victories were the product of organized event-crashing that irritated party regulars, Rand has dedicated himself to becoming a force within the GOP — and CPAC ’13 represents the latest evidence that he’s succeeding.”

From Salon

The mainstreaming of Rand Paul, interesting title for an article. I saw another article in the magazine The Week with the title: “Does the rising of Rand Paul mean and end to social conservatism?” Which are the two things to focus on as well as laying out what constitutional conservatism actually is and how that differs from religious conservatism and they may sound like the same thing but they are actually different.

If you look at Rand Paul’s political background whether you want to call it Conservative or Conservative-Libertarian or just flat Libertarian, he’s always been in the mainstream in America as far as someone who believes that big government shouldn’t interfere in our economic or personal lives. Meaning that government shouldn’t try to control us or run our lives or even try to protect us from ourselves. Not that it shouldn’t tax, but not tax us to the point where we lose the freedom to control our own destiny and not be dependent on the state for our economic well-being.

Conservative-Libertarians like Senator Paul, also believe that government shouldn’t interfere into our personal lives as well. And what we do in the privacy of our own homes, what we watch on TV, who we sleep with and marry as adults, how we spend our own money, as long as we aren’t hurting innocent people with what we are doing. There’s nothing radical about this and this view of what government shouldn’t be doing is a shared viewpoint on both the Right and Left in America which is why it’s mainstream.

Constitutional-Conservatives or Conservative-Libertarians, believe in conserving the U.S. Constitution and all the individual rights that all Americans get from it. As well as conserving our limited government and preventing government (especially the Federal Government) from getting too big. Wheres Christian-Conservatives or Christian-Nationalists, believe in covering their own culture and religious values. Even if that means using big government to try to enforce their values on everyone else. Which is very different from constitutional conservatism or conservative libertarianism and very different from Senator Rand Paul.

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