No single member of the Senate has done more to advance civil liberties than Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky. Paul has sparred with President Barack Obama, filibustering his appointees to make a point about civilian surveillance, and played sycophant to President Trump so he can convince the president to pull out of war zones. Paul introduced the Justice For Breonna Taylor Act earlier this summer, a bill to ban the same no-knock warrants that led to a perfectly innocent essential worker dying in her bed because of police officers seeking someone else. And yet, the oft-alienated libertarian Paul found himself hounded not by the ever-more authoritarian Republican Party but by the very same activists who supposedly want justice not just for Taylor but action to prevent deaths like hers from ever happening again.
As Paul left Trump’s White House speech on the final night of the Republican National Convention, protesters (many of whom were unmasked and not social distancing during a viral pandemic transmitted by respiratory droplets) hounded the Republican and his wife Kelley, demanding that Paul acknowledge the shooting victim he literally authored a bill about. Paul, who has already been (unsuccessfully) shot at by a domestic terrorist who nearly murdered Rep. Steve Scalise and was (successfully) beaten to a bloody pulp by a neighbor who broke multiple of Paul’s ribs, was rightfully frightened by the mob, thanking local police for preventing the situation from escalating.
Public figures, especially elected officials, assume the job with the expectation that some degree of unfair online harassment and tabloid bullying comes with it. What they absolutely do not accept or deserve is to be made unsafe in public spaces intended for all members of civil society. And even if we were accepting the absurd premise that we’re on the precipice between civilization and anarchy or democracy and outright tyranny, Paul would be the last Republican, if not the last senator, to target.
While party grandstanders talk the talk against Trump while authorizing his omnibus spending packages, Paul has repeatedly saved his fire for crucially maintaining the president’s ear on foreign policy and voting against his wasteful packages and abuses of power, such as an emergency order to divert funding to build the still mostly nonexistent wall. And most importantly and with the most material result, Paul has remained a stalwart of criminal justice and police reform, playing a key role in the passage of the First Step Act and now pressuring the rest of the Senate to enact sweeping police reform.
And yet, he was treated like a 1986 Joe Biden for a simple reason, mainly that these “activists” don’t actually care about what they enact. If they did, they’d be on Chuck Schumer’s doorstep, demanding that he get his colleagues in line to pass Tim Scott’s landmark police reform bill rather than filibustering it to death. If they did, they would be monitoring and protecting minority-owned businesses and fundraising to put cameras on the perimeters of every single one of them, both to monitor criminals looking to loot them and to protect civilians targeted by the police around them. And if they did, the polling indicates we’d have a lot more progress: A resounding 19 in 20 people polled by Gallup say that we need at least some changes to policing, with even the vast majority of Republicans saying we need at least minor changes.
But of course, change is so passe. Virtue signaling is all the rage these days, and demanding that the senator who literally authored a bill about the woman you say you’re compelled by is a pretty good way to get attention.
