Only Blind Partisanship Could Prevent Liberals From Seeing Rand Paul as a Principled Critic of Executive Overreach
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More on Rand Paul, Trump’s most slavering congressional lackey:
The Republican Party has largely decided to cover for Donald Trump’s massive corruption, grotesque lies, and manifest unfitness for office. But few of them have gone quite so far, or quite so cravenly, as Rand Paul. The junior senator from Kentucky, and onetime hope of the extremely short-lived “libertarian moment” in American politics, has not only attached himself to Trump, but is actively snuffing out whatever faint stirrings of opposition his colleagues can muster.
While the GOP Congress has ignored the president’s self-enrichment, refusal to disclose his tax returns, and clear violations of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, some have expressed willingness to investigate his opaque ties to Russia. Paul is not one of them. And not only does he see no need for investigation on Russia, Paul has staked out a stance against any investigations, period, on the brutally frank grounds that it would impair the party’s legislative agenda. “I just don’t think it’s useful to be doing investigation after investigation, particularly of your own party,” he told “Kilmeade and Friends.” “We’ll never even get started with doing the things we need to do, like repealing Obamacare, if we’re spending our whole time having Republicans investigate Republicans.”
Many Republicans have made piecemeal excuses not to exercise the oversight function. Only Paul has elevated the practice of looking away from the crimes of the Executive branch to an actual principle of governance.
No wonder Michael Tracey liked him so much!
The only thing you can say on Rand’s behalf is that at least he’s no longer even pretending that he will act to check the unprecedentedly corrupt and unfit president and doesn’t even pretend that his actions are motivated by anything but partisanship. This in its way is an improvement over the McCains and Grahams who will pretend to be disturbed by Trump’s abuses of power but will do exactly as much about them as Paul will.