You couldn’t see it on TV, but he came to the Senate floor in trainers, tied with bright neon laces. Rand Paul, the senator from Kentucky in the United States, was prepared to hold the floor for as long as it took on Sunday night to deal a blow to the Patriot Act.
“The Bill of Rights isn’t so much for the prom queen. The Bill of Rights isn’t so much for the high-school quarterback,” Paul argued. “The Bill of Rights is for those who are less fortunate, for those who might be a minority of thought, deed or race.”
As the hours passed, a number of other senators came to the floor to express their support, including several Democrats and a clutch of fellow Republicans.
In the hyper-polarised corridors of contemporary Washington, Paul’s filibuster was a rare moment of bipartisan agreement, led by one of the most polarising members of the Senate. “Little by little,” he said, “we’ve allowed our freedom to slip away.”
The trainers came in handy: Paul held the floor for 10-and-a-half hours, calling a halt to his filibuster shortly before midnight. No real damage had been done to the legislative schedule of Senate majority leader, and fellow Kentuckian, Mitch McConnell, but as The New York Times noted the next day, Paul's stand had demonstrated: "Mr McConnell and other national security hawks who failed to continue the programme badly underestimated the shift in the national mood, which has found its voice with Democrats and the libertarian wing of the Republican Party." The Republican Party's lockstep embrace of the ever-growing national-security apparatus had rendered its leaders blind to the voters' growing distaste for a state of permanent war against terrorism, threatening the privacy of everyday Americans.
Like another second-generation politician, Marine Le Pen, Paul is the scion of a wildly popular but deeply controversial father, intent on presenting a more attractive face on a familiar set of outré ideas and winning the country’s highest office. Le Pen has taken her father Jean-Marie’s pugnacious conservatism and attempted to scrub it clean of anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim sentiment; Paul is intent on carrying his father Ron’s libertarianism into the two-party mainstream, while unabashedly pivoting towards mainstream conservatives.
Randal Paul (his wife Kelley would be the one to dub him Rand) was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on January 7, 1963. His father Ron was an obstetrician and gynaecologist who found himself pushed toward politics by his reading of the work of economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. When Rand was 11, his father ran for Congress in Texas, and lost, but won a special election for the same seat two years later. Ron would end up serving in Congress from 1976 to 1977, 1979 to 1985 and 1997 to 2013, but his libertarian stances on foreign policy put him at the fringe of Texas politics, even as a Republican. Rand attended Baylor University, where he lived the moderately debauched life of a fraternity brother. During his 2010 campaign, he was said to have kidnapped a woman (albeit playfully), offering her marijuana and requesting she worship a deity they called “Aqua Buddha”.
Paul didn’t finish college, having left early to assist his father’s abortive 1984 Senate campaign. Afterwards, Rand followed his father to Duke’s medical school. He graduated in 1988, the same year his father ran for president on the Libertarian Party ticket. Rand served as his father’s right-hand man, immersing himself in the nitty-gritty of political campaigning. After doing his medical residency and internship in Georgia and North Carolina, Rand and Kelley settled in Bowling Green, Kentucky, where he began an ophthalmology practice. Paul started an organisation called Kentucky Taxpayers United, devoted to the cause of shrinking government, and when his father decided to mount another congressional campaign for his old seat in 1996, Rand served as his father’s campaign strategist. Ron won and served eight more terms in Congress, even with his opponent uncovering numerous examples of racist and anti-Semitic diatribes in newsletters published in the 1990s. Ron ran for president again in 2008 as a Republican, attracting support during the financial crisis that autumn, which spoke to many of his long-standing concerns about the stability of the economy.
Rand, who had privately agreed with his wife not to mount a political career of his own until he was 50, turned towards thoughts of campaigning. When the longtime senator Jim Bunning announced his retirement before the 2010 election, Paul declared for his seat. In a television interview, Paul argued that while he was opposed to racist discrimination, his beliefs prevented him from supporting any governmental efforts to ban or limit discrimination. He would eventually have to declare his support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – not generally a topic of fervent debate in 21st-century American politics.
Paul timed his entry into politics perfectly, defeating his Republican primary opponent by 24 points and easily winning the general election. The rise of the Tea Party, and its ethos of smaller government, meshed well with both of the Pauls’ libertarianism.
As a senator, Paul has simultaneously demonstrated his fealty to Republican orthodoxy (opposition to abortion and gay marriage; in favour of repealing ObamaCare) while staking positions well outside the conservative mainstream on certain issues. He has attempted to differentiate himself from his father by reaching out to the African-American community, speaking at Howard University about civil rights and being firmly against the explosion of the American prison population. He has also tagged his party’s more hawkish elements with being indirectly responsible for the arming of ISIL.
But no issue has defined Paul’s presence in national politics so much as the surveillance question. Echoing his libertarian desire to keep politicians out of Americans’ personal lives, Paul has spoken on numerous occasions about the unconstitutionality and ham-handedness of the government’s surveillance of citizens. “I believe what you do on your cell phone is none of their damn business,” he told an audience at the University of California at Berkeley last year.
He suggested opening an investigation into the NSA bulk data collection programs, and argued even those who trusted President Obama not to overstep Americans’ privacy should be leery of offering those same powers to future presidents. “We already don’t catch terrorists with collecting all the data,” he said in an interview this week. “So should we put television monitors in every house to try to prevent terrorist attacks? There is a zero-sum game here that leads us down a slippery slope to where there would be no freedom left.”
In April, Paul declared himself a candidate for president. He's currently, as The New York Times puts it, "leading a second tier of Republican candidates", ahead of Ted Cruz and Chris Christie in the most recent polling, but still outside the first tier of front-runners such as Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Scott Walker. But perhaps the most significant information in that poll was in the head-to-head matchups between Republican candidates and the presumed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. While more prominent names lagged badly against Clinton, Paul was polled as running within four points of the former secretary of state. With the national Republican brand still tarnished, especially among women and minorities, Paul's brand of mix-and-match conservatism, progressive on surveillance and ill-inclined towards future foreign entanglements, speaks to younger voters exhausted by governmental overreach and more than a decade of American wars.
With his Patriot Act filibuster, Paul staked a claim as the country’s most notable defender of civil liberties, while accomplishing little of political substance. The Patriot Act was reapproved two days later, and while the government will no longer be in the business of collecting Americans’ phone records, it still has extraordinary leeway to peek into citizens’ lives.
Meanwhile, Paul has won new attention for himself and his ideas, thrusting himself into the centre of the Republican scrum for the presidency. He has the potential to appeal to voters written off by Republicans for the past decade or more, presenting a hands-off conservatism rejuvenated by libertarian ideals. But how will he win over conservative primary voters without selling out the ideas that could conceivably propel him to, if not victory, at least a serviceable showing against a Democratic opponent in the general election? The path currently appears to be close to non-existent, but Paul is gamely attempting to thread the needle nonetheless.
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