Rand's Rebellion
Submitted by bobbyw24 on Mon, 12/05/2011 - 11:45The Tea Party senator from Kentucky picked his battles on war and civil liberties.
In recent months, most of Rand Paul's political odd-couple pairings have underscored the Kentucky senator's Republican credentials. Paul joined with John McCain to introduce a GOP jobs bill. He teamed up with Lindsey Graham on legislation that would prioritize smaller harbors for dredging work. He worked with his fellow Kentuckian, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, on repealing net neutrality.
When Paul arrived in Washington, it was widely assumed he would spend some of his time fighting these men as well. Last week, that time finally came. On a series of votes involving foreign policy and civil liberties, one of the Senate's most rock-ribbed Republicans channeled John F. Kennedy: "Sometimes party loyalty asks too much."
McCain and Carl Levin, the liberal Michigan Democrat who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, agreed on rules for detaining suspected terrorists. They claimed it would leave most Americans untouched, affecting only a tiny minority who would take up arms against their own country as members of known terrorist organizations like al Qaeda.
Critics charged that the McCain-Levin language gave too large a role for the military in potential civilian prosecutions and lacked adequate safeguards to prevent the indefinite detention of American citizens. If the U.S. is a battlefield and the war on terror has no end in sight, it is dangerous to tell Americans, as Lindsey Graham puts it, "And when they say 'I want my lawyer,' you tell them, 'Shut up.'"
