Senator Rand Paul likes to take unpopular stands. The Kentucky Republican relishes making life difficult for bipartisan majorities attempting to pass compromise legislation, and he delights in pointing out the imperfections of his colleagues’ proposals. Paul is beloved by libertarians, privacy advocates, and anti-war activists. But while conservatives may agree or disagree with Paul’s stated aim on a particular issue—we often share his views on fiscal questions, though we loathe his tactics and attitudinizing—his self-righteous exhibitionism isn’t just silly and off-putting. It’s dangerous.
In typical fashion, Paul threatened to vote against Mike Pompeo as secretary of state on the grounds that Pompeo is a foreign policy hawk. With the great majority of Democrats last week expressing opposition to Pompeo, and with Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) signaling doubts and John McCain (R-Ariz.) unable to attend, Paul’s “no” vote on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee might have meant an unfavorable recommendation by the committee to the full Senate, a 50-50 split and a vice presidential tie-breaking vote, or even the defeat of Pompeo’s nomination.
Leave aside the partisan hackery of those Democrats who supported Pompeo as CIA director and now purport to believe he can’t lead the State Department. We’ve come to expect as much from them. Paul’s threat of a “no” vote (he also voted against Pompeo for CIA director) was born of sheer perverse sanctimony. Granted, Pompeo’s views on foreign affairs differ substantially from those of Paul. But John Kerry’s views differed from Paul’s even more, and yet the Kentucky senator voted for Kerry in committee and on the floor. There was, in truth, no defensible reason for Paul’s threat: Pompeo’s views fall firmly within the mainstream of the Republican Party, his qualifications are beyond dispute, he is an able administrator and sensible policymaker, and the president—who is often not a sensible policymaker—seems to like and trust him. And yet Paul threatened to vote Pompeo down. Why? So that Trump could pick a less qualified and less astute secretary of state? So that Trump could operate with no secretary of state at all and carry out his own diplomacy?
In the end, Paul vowed to support Pompeo. The reason for his change of mind isn’t entirely clear. Last week the Kentucky senator said that for him to vote for Pompeo, “it would really take Director Pompeo showing that he really does agree with the president’s vision that [the] Iraq war was a mistake, that we stayed in Afghanistan too long.” His agreement, in other words, was contingent on Pompeo telling him that he was right about 15-year-old policy disputes. On Monday, having met with the nominee, Paul claimed in a series of tweets that he had secured Pompeo’s admission: “After calling continuously for weeks for Director Pompeo to support President Trump’s belief that the Iraq war was a mistake, and that it is time to leave Afghanistan, today I received confirmation the Director Pompeo agrees with [President Trump]”; “President Trump believes that Iraq was a mistake, that regime change has destabilized the region, and that we must end our involvement with Afghanistan”; “Having received assurances from President Trump and Director Pompeo that he agrees with the President on these important issues, I have decided to support his nomination to be our next Secretary of State.”
So, according to Paul, Trump has said we should pull out of Afghanistan (what hasn’t Trump said, by the way?) and Pompeo says he agrees with Trump. Does this mean Pompeo thinks the U.S. should immediately pull out of Afghanistan? That’s the impression Paul means to leave, but no one who’s followed Mike Pompeo’s career will find it easy to believe he said any such thing.
One wonders what the point of all this gesturing was, but Paul has long made perverse and pointless obstructionism his brand. In 2013 he staged a 13-hour filibuster to stop the confirmation of John Brennan as director of the CIA. We’re no fans of Brennan; but his qualifications were not in doubt and anyhow his confirmation was inevitable. In 2015 he attempted, in a 10-hour filibuster, to block National Security Agency surveillance programs authorized under the Patriot Act. During the long debate in 2017 over repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, Paul consistently rejected any bill that didn’t impose a full-on, unconditional repeal—this despite the fact that such a bill had no chance of making it out of the Senate. In January of this year, Paul threatened to block reauthorization of section 702 of the FISA Act—a law that was the result of hard-fought bipartisan compromises on the surveillance issue. And in March, he blocked a procedural vote that pushed the government into a brief shutdown.
Paul is entitled to take strong libertarian views on counterterrorism and health care policy. His views aren’t the problem. The problem is that he advances those views, not by proposing alternatives and leading his colleagues to embrace them, but merely by blocking whatever he can find to block. Rand Paul’s perverse and increasingly dangerous naysaying affords him copious attention from the news media—and that, we’re left to conclude, is the point.
