05/15/09 – Rand Paul – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing Dr.
Rand Paul, son of Dr.
Ron Paul, and in fact, a doctor in his own right, a surgeon.
I believe it is.
And he announced last night on the Rachel Maddow show, the creation of an exploratory committee to look at running as a Republican for the U.S.
Senate in 2010.
Very interesting news.
And, uh, and here to discuss his plans and his views, Dr.
Rand Paul, welcome to the show, sir.
How are you doing?
Good.
Good to be with you, Scott.
Uh, well, I'm happy to have you here.
And, um, uh, I'm not sure if you're aware, but I'll go ahead and tell you, your dad is the only politician I like.
And, uh, that's a pretty small group then of politicians.
Yeah.
I, I really don't like politicians very much at all.
And, um, uh, you know, no offense to you.
I'm, I'm half the man my father is.
So, uh, you know, I don't know if I should really expect that you're as good as him on all the issues, but I sure would like to find out, uh, gotta be better than most fire away.
We're ready for you.
All right.
Well, uh, first of all, why don't you just, uh, tell us what you think are the most important issues, uh, facing this country?
What kind of things do you think will be your top priorities in the U S Senate?
Were you to attain that position?
I think right now the economy seems to be dominating the issues, you know, a year or two ago it was the Iraq war, but now I think it's the economy that dominates things.
I think the two are interrelated in the sense that part of the reason we're bankrupt as a country is, you know, fighting so many foreign wars and having so many military bases around the world.
But I think right now the predominant thing that people are concerned about is the economy.
I think the deficit is spiraling upwards.
I think it, uh, threatens really, um, our economy in a way bigger than some have even mentioned so far in the sense that I think it's not just future generations that will pay for the deficit.
I think we all may be paying for the deficit very soon through higher prices and through inflation.
And I actually think we could get 1979 or worse.
Now, uh, I know that your father has been interested in and really an expert in, uh, Austrian school economics for decades and decades.
Uh, have you been learning this stuff all along as well?
Are you, are you anywhere near the expert on this kind of, uh, discussion as your father is?
I don't want to claim to be an expert on it, but I'd say I'm a pretty well read layman.
I've read most of Von Mises' work, a lot of Rothbard's works, Henry Hazlitt, uh, a lot of the free market economists I'm very familiar with.
I'm familiar with the arguments for the marketplace and I think I can articulate the arguments and the defense of the marketplace that's necessary to, uh, uh, create a political coalition to, uh, to win a race.
But would, would any of your constituents have reason to fear that you're going to start sounding like a Chicago school supply cider because that's kind of sort of free market enough?
Or are you, uh, you know, really about the individualist theory behind Austrian economics?
No, I would say that that would more accurately describe me.
Definitely.
Uh, you know, I've been following not only of the Austrians, but was a fan of Rand growing up.
And, uh, so I think the ideas and the concepts of individualism are something I don't take as something that we compromise and something that is very important that, you know, it's sort of the origin of our political philosophy.
Well, and now what about that cost of empire?
You talked about the economy being the most important issue and of course the enormous expense.
Um, a trillion dollars a year is the number that your father often cites.
I think, uh, his footnote being Robert Higgs there at the independent Institute, uh, that is spent on maintaining this world empire in order to try to shore up the economy is rolling back the empire, not the first order of business.
Yeah, I think they're interrelated.
And I also think they, they become the political coalition you need in order to win a race basically, because there are people from the left who acknowledge the, uh, vast expenditure of the military industrial complex.
There are some on the right that are beginning to understand that, but it's really this sort of right left paradigm that you bring these groups together in order to try to win, win an election.
And I think it is coming.
And I think for many years we had Republicans who simply said, Oh, let's just cut off the welfare queen and we'll balance the budget.
Well, realistically you can't balance the budget.
There's not enough money spent in welfare at the federal level to balance your budget.
Is there some welfare you could cut?
Yeah, but really there's a lot of welfare, warfare, corporatism, and money that's being given at a high level to corporations that needs to be reformed.
And I think that is a place you start.
One of the things that I think my father doesn't talk much about, but I will be talking about some, and I think he would not disagree, but he just doesn't tend to talk about it as much is that I think we need to reform the way money corrupts politics.
And there were attempts made at this, but most of these attempts trampled on the first amendment, like McCain Feingold.
But I think there are ways to reform the way money corrupts politics by when you dole out federal contracts, I would make a rule or a law that says when you dole out a contract that's worth more than a million dollars, or for example, Halliburton had a billion dollar no-bid contract, make it part of the contract a clause that they voluntary accept that they will not lobby government during the terms of their contract, that they will not give PAC contributions during the terms of their contract, and I think you can get some of the abuse that money brings into the system without infringing on the first amendment, but by telling people, look, you want a contract, you got to go by the stipulations of the federal contract.
Well, and now that sounds like a reasonable approach.
I think your father's position has basically been what we need is a bunch of people who have as much integrity as him, who, as the Washington Post notes, the lobbyists don't bother Ron Paul in the houses of Congress, because they know he's just going to say, I'm sorry, I don't have any authority to give you a bunch of money at everybody else's expense, and so they don't even bother, because he is basically incorruptible, and yet you hint at the problem there, the corruption of money in politics, it seems like if there's only been one Ron Paul in Congress that I can find all this time, there's every reason to suspect you, sir, of being the kind of person like every other politician except him before you, who would in fact have to sell out some of his principles in order to obtain power.
Are you immune from those kinds of pressures the way your father is?
Yeah, and I think people can only come to believe that by hearing you speak, and by seeing your message, and seeing what you put out in the written word.
And obviously, I believe that in the sense that, you know, I'm not going up to compromise to get elected, I'm not going up to say things or provide various goodies or special interest with various contracts in order to get elected, I think we have serious problems.
And I wouldn't bother leaving my state, my family, my practice, everything else to go to Washington, if I thought it was only to get ahead in a personal way.
So yeah, I think the believability on that people have to, it takes people time to do that.
But I think it's also, you hint on the fact also that, you know, if it's taken, if there's one politician in the last decade that you believe had any integrity, that's also why you need some rules to restrain the rest of the mess up there.
And one reason why I think some rules to restrain the corruption of money are necessary, because until we elect, you know, 218 Ron Pauls, we need a way to try to restrain the rest of the crowd.
Well, and as he often says, I guess it was Harry Brown's old phrase, it's not so much the abuse of power, it's the power to abuse.
And isn't that really the problem that we face, Dr. Paul, is that the Congress has virtually no limit on its authority, the President either.
And so as long as they can take as much money from us as they want, or create as much of it as they want, and spend it on providing favors to constituencies around the country, we're basically in the iron grip of this money corruption.
Right, and I think you're exactly right.
We at one time were a constitutional republic where we had restraints.
And now we're much more of a pure democracy.
And this is kind of what many of the founding fathers feared.
Jefferson, you know, called a democracy nothing more than a mob rule, where 51% get to decide what 49% have in rights.
And that's the problem.
We had a great acceleration of this in the 1930s, when the Commerce Clause came to mean almost everything.
You know, one of the worst cases was that opened the door was in 1942, you have Richard V. Filburn, and a guy wants to grow some wheat on his land in California.
And they say, well, no, just consuming your own wheat on your land that could be qualified as interstate commerce, because you chose not to sell it on the interstate market.
But from those decisions, we've kept widening and widening.
And now we have sort of the Gonzales v.
Wright decision where they say, California wants to allow medical marijuana.
And the federal government comes in and says, Oh, no, that defies the Commerce Clause also, because that marijuana looks like other marijuana that could be sold interstate.
So therefore, even though you're growing it your own plant and using it for medicinal uses, that that somehow qualifies as interstate commerce.
So we became to a ridiculous point where there are really no constitutional restraints anymore.
And that's what we need to turn back the page on and begin to realize that we need to have constitutional restraints, not only in the economy, like with the Commerce Clause, but with the War Declaration clause.
Well, and that's a very important point and really leads to my next question.
If you're running in a Republican primary, there's going to be a lot of heat about your position on war and your choice then will be either to moderate your position and sound a little bit more Republican on foreign policy issues to try to appease them or to do like I've seen your father do with his constituency down there in District 14 in South Texas, one of the barbecues there, I think it was in 2004.
I saw your father explained to a very pro war constituency at his birthday barbecue bash there that listen, I know that you people respect George Bush.
I know, you know, he's from Texas, you want to stand by and support the troops.
I know that you think, you know, patriotism is at stake here, our freedom is at stake here.
But I'm just here to tell you, that's not my view.
I'm a peacenik.
And here's why.
And here's what you need to understand.
And if you disagree with me, that's okay.
If you don't think I represent you, that's okay.
But that's where I stand.
And that's how I'm always going to vote.
And and he explained Robert Pape and the causes of suicide terrorism and the rest of it.
And he and and as you well know, he continues to be reelected in that Republican district, in fact, was even reelected just two weeks after voting against the Iraq war, because he stands on his principle.
Is that the model that you're going to follow when it comes to heated debates on the issues of war and peace in these Republican primaries?
Yeah, and I think probably I tell people in my speeches that the most important vote that any congressman or senator ever has is on war and peace.
And while other issues are of great importance, nothing is more important than sending a young person to to war.
And so I think there is nothing more important or more grave.
And had I been in the Senate during the debate over Afghanistan or over Iraq, I would have forced a vote on declaration of war.
One of the greatest things I think my father did in that whole debate was in the International Affairs Committee, he made them vote on a declaration of war.
And it was interesting, the responses you got, I think at the time, the chairman was a Republican.
And he looked at my dad and said, Ron, that that part of the Constitution is an anachronism.
We don't pay attention to that anymore.
And the leading Democrat on the committee says, Ron, you're just making frivolous arguments here.
And so that's sort of the way they address it is that they think it's all about power and majority and democracies, and has nothing to do with the rule of law.
But had I been in the Senate, I would have held things up.
Now I do tell people and I think it's important to tell people your position.
But I think this is also something that can be accepted in a Republican primary is that I would have forced a vote on declaration of war in both cases, but I probably would have voted for declaration of war with Afghanistan.
And I would have voted against declaration of war with Iraq.
So I think that that, you know, not only is that my position, I think that's an acceptable position in a Republican primary.
Well, you know, I mean, are you taking into account there the fact that the Taliban offered to turn Osama bin Laden over if we just provided a little bit of evidence they would have given him up to any Muslim government, I think it was, or at least any Arab government to be tried in the region, things like that?
Was it necessary to declare war against the Taliban, which after all, try to send their foreign minister to warn us of an impending attack by al Qaeda?
I think that some of the details on there are worthy of consideration.
And whether or not they were willing to turn over bin Laden would have been a big decision in declaration of war.
But I didn't see any evidence that they were rounding up bin Laden and turning over, there's about a month to go in.
And I think during that month, you have that debate, and you have that discussion.
And if they were willing to do that, but in the end, they fought hand in hand with bin Laden.
So I think to separate the Taliban is out as being some, you know, force that really diplomacy would have worked with, I think was probably a mistaken notion.
Well, of course, we're occupying Afghanistan now.
And our war has morphed from a war against al Qaeda into a war against the Taliban.
And in fact, according to many experts I talked to on this show, into a war against the Pashtuns.
And the fact that the American occupying force likes to call anyone who resists Taliban, notwithstanding, what's happened is basically the entire Pashtun tribal system on both sides of the Afghan Pakistan border is resisting our occupation.
Is it okay for us to now differentiate between them and al Qaeda?
Or do we have to defeat all the Pashtun tribes?
Yeah, no, I think that the idea of having a 10 year war that goes on and on, you eventually when you occupy a country, you run into more and more problems that I would not have been in favor of.
And in fact, I think the, you know, when you decide to declare war, you have to also decide how to end war.
And, you know, I would not be in favor of a long term occupation of, you know, Iraq or Afghanistan.
Okay.
Now, you speak of the rule of law, what's your position on torture and on war crimes prosecutions for the many torturers in the previous administration?
I'm opposed to torture.
And I think our country should have a higher ideal than that.
And I would oppose it and would make that part of it.
Well, it's actually officially is part of our army manual not to do we just don't pay attention to our own rules.
But yeah, I think that torture is always wrong and shouldn't be performed.
Well, and what about prosecutions and official investigations?
In fact, a student of the Constitution, as I know you are, the Constitution says that any treaties ratified by the Senate are the law of the land, nothing in the federal law or the Constitution notwithstanding, not that there's a conflict in this case, I don't think American federal law and the Constitution seem to be in harmony, if not, you know, word for word the same.
There doesn't seem to be a conflict between them and our international obligations, which mandate official investigations into credible accusations of torture.
They don't say if you feel like it, they say if you don't do it, we will.
Yeah, I'm not sure I'm in favor of, you know, trying George Bush and some kind of trial for torture.
I don't know that does good for the country or is a I think it ended up being more of a political question than it ended up being whether or not you can try a political leader.
And there are some arguments for whether or not a president can be tried for things like that.
With regard to, you know, if you take it back, and you look at a specific instance, like Abu Ghraib, where there was torture and inappropriate behavior by guards, I think it was a mistake there that the only people they tried were the enlisted people right around them.
I think there's no way that there were not officers, at least within that cell block that had to have knowledge of what was going on.
And if not giving directions to it.
So I think they whitewash a lot of things like that.
I think it's harder to decide if you're going to try a soldier at Guantanamo, who does this under direct orders?
Is it that person that should be tried or the person that gives the orders?
And if the orders went all the way up to the chain to either Dick Cheney or George Bush, should they be tried for it?
I don't think that that is good for the country, probably.
And I don't think that that's going to occur.
Well, I don't think anybody thinks it's going to occur, but it leaves us with a moral dilemma, doesn't it?
When, as it is revealed, and as he admits on TV more and more every day, Dick Cheney ordered this stuff.
And as you say, low-level guards at Abu Ghraib prison, they're in jail right now.
They're in prison right now for what they've done.
And all the lies of the last few years notwithstanding, we know it's in the paper trail.
We know for a fact that George Bush and Dick Cheney are the ones who ordered this.
Dick Cheney accused or invoked George Bush as being in on every bit of it on TV just the other day.
Well, the other problem is that it gets even bigger than that, in the sense that all the leaders, both the Republican and Democrat, are complicit in just about everything that happened.
Because Pelosi now plays games with did she know or didn't she know about these interrogation techniques.
My guess is that the leaders of all the intelligence committees, intelligence committees as well as the congressional leaders on both sides, knew very well of all the things that were going on.
They knew most about these wiretaps.
I mean, for goodness sakes, the greatest irony, and it just makes me laugh and think it's just hilarious, is that Jane Harman got caught up in the wiretapping when she was a big proponent of it, you know.
And I think it serves her right, but shows also how, if she truly is innocent, how innocent people get caught up in wiretapping.
But that's the way it was.
The Republicans and the Democrats at high levels supported and at least knew that Bush had given these orders to allow torture to occur.
Well, but now what about the law?
Because I believe that the whole theory of having a rule of law is it does apply to the president and to the vice president.
And if they're felons, they're felons.
Because after all, they're just American citizens like the rest of us.
They're not royalty.
Right.
But I think there are also some questions that are, that blur the line between being political questions and criminal questions.
And that's a difficult one.
You know, we had the same question with Nixon, you know, when he left and Nixon was finally pardoned and people faulted Ford for doing the pardoning.
But in the end, was it good for the country to move forward?
I think it probably was.
I think probably more important than the debate over prosecuting George Bush or Dick Cheney is the question of should we torture?
And we need to make sure in the future that that doesn't happen again.
The, you know, if you have people that with with regard to torture, you know, the question becomes more complicated, because some will say they oppose it, but then they just want to change the definition to call something not torture that really is torture.
So I think the importance is in moving forward and deciding what policy you have in the future.
All right now.
Well, I think this is important.
And I hope you don't take it too personal.
But it seems like something pretty objectionable, not just in public life, mostly in government employment, I guess we could call it but even in private life.
We have problems in this society with the idea of nepotism.
And the idea of, you know, Bill Crystal gets to write all over the place because of who his father is not because anything he says has any credibility to it, and that kind of thing.
And we have the Kennedy dynasty and the Bush dynasty, and the Romney's.
And we have all these families following each other into power.
And it occurs to me that if our society is really based on the theory of individual liberty, and, and, you know, congressmen and senators being the representatives of their local people, it's amazing to me that we would ever need to resort to picking people from families that are already in power when a society of 300 million people, does that bother you at all?
Or do you think it's, it does bother you a little but not enough to stop you?
Or what's your view of the question of political power inside private families in this country?
One thing the problem is, is the electoral process makes it very difficult for anybody to run for office and to beat incumbents.
Once you have incumbents, incumbents almost never lose.
If you look at the rate of incumbency in the United States versus the Soviet Politburo, actually, the Politburo had a higher rate of turnover.
So there is a problem with that.
And people try to look at this problem and say, how do we fix the system?
But nobody's been able to come up with a way to fix the system where very wealthy people don't have an advantage by spending their own money.
And does celebrity status or being well known help you?
Jesse Ventura won because of his celebrity.
Arnold Schwarzenegger won.
And then some people win on the celebrity names of their families.
And is there a way to make the world perfect?
I'm not sure there is.
But I don't think it also is a criticism that says, hmm, your family is famous, therefore that disqualifies you from participating in the process.
I think you create your own way.
And it may open some doors in the beginning.
For example, I couldn't have done this in 2006.
Because, you know, my father's campaign hadn't grown to a national level, I hadn't gone out and helped him in many different states, and become well known to some people in the movement.
So no, I couldn't have done this in 2006 in a statewide race.
But it does allow me now to run a statewide race and be treated as a credible candidate.
So it has opened doors, it hopefully will open doors in fundraising.
But to be embarrassed by that, no, I'm absolutely ecstatic that I'm able to participate in this process, and that I can help be a leader in the freedom movement.
Well, and you know, I basically feel the same way, too.
If, if the whole apple tree thing works out, then I think I'd be pretty happy to have another Paul in Congress up there.
But I, you know, I do think of it sort of as making an exception.
Because, well, I guess, like you say, the system is so unfair now.
It takes that if you were the son of even even your father, when he was a congressman, but not so famous from having just run for president, you still wouldn't have the name recognition necessary to run for a statewide office like you're doing it takes some kind of big in to get it into political power in America.
Right.
And that's for better or worse the way it is.
But at the same time, we should hopefully glorify the fact that we've gotten a lot of political families that have been pretty crummy.
Maybe we can get a political family that'll be a little bit better for individual freedom.
Yeah, would be a nice change.
Okay, now, last question to wrap up here.
The most important question.
Barack Obama has said we're getting out of Iraq by 2012.
And apparently he has till 2012 before he's broken that promise.
And anybody's supposed to complain about the fact that we're still occupying that country.
On the other hand, your father, Ron Paul, has continued to speak out eloquently about how we ought to be out of Iraq now, not later.
Just like George McGovern actually wrote a piece in the LA Times a few weeks back making the same case.
Is that your position out of Iraq now?
And, and whichever your position is, would you please make it for us?
Yeah, I say not out of Iraq now, I say out of Iraq two or three years ago, and we'll never go in even better.
But I think that when you get out, the only thing that you need to propose and that people will accept is that you do it in an orderly fashion.
The main thing that for example, Republicans fear and didn't like about out of Iraq is that they fear the helicopters taking off the embassy and people hanging on to the helicopters like they saw in Saigon.
And nobody wants to see that happen.
But to tell you the truth, through an orderly process and working with the generals in the military, you probably could orderly be gone from Iraq in a six month period from whenever you started.
And that time period could have started years ago.
You had to turn over more quickly, even if you disagree with the war, you should have been we should have been forcing them to turn over more quickly back to the Iraq Army and Iraq people.
So yes, I say out of Iraq, as soon as you can get out of there, the only thing I would say is that to make it acceptable to everyone, you have to say that we'll get out in an orderly fashion.
But that doesn't mean you have to say we take 468 10 years, my fear in 2012 is actually that they'll just be out of the cities, maybe and still in in bases, and that will be there permanently in the bases.
So I'll kind of believe it when I see it, if we actually are gone in 2012, I doubt that we will be.
Well, if you win the election in 2010, and you take office in the beginning of 2011, are we going to be able to trust that we can turn on C-SPAN and see you raising hell in the Imperial Senate filibustering if necessary and putting an end to this war by yourself if it comes down to it?
Well, I think that's the one thing you can do in the Senate that you can't do in the House is one senator can hold up things quite a bit.
And like I say, had I been there during Afghanistan or Iraq, there would have been a vote on Declaration of War.
And I think you might have had different outcome.
I think many of the Democrats who now say, well, I voted for force before I voted against force, and I never thought Bush would have used force, but I kind of voted for it anyway.
You wouldn't have all that sort of complaints back and forth and sort of wishy-washiness if they were forced to vote on a Declaration of War.
So you might not have ever had Iraq if you had to have a formal vote.
And I think there's a very good chance you wouldn't have.
And I would have stood up and forced that vote.
All right, everybody, that's Dr. Rand Paul.
He's running for the U.S. Senate in the state of Kentucky.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
Sure.
If you want to know more about it or see any of our issues, randpaul2010.com.
All right.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you, Scott.
Thank you.