At a
Republican Liberty Caucus event in Dallas last Friday, Rand
Paul argued that the GOP can expand its appeal without forsaking
conservative principles by supporting criminal justice reform,
including a less punitive approach to drugs:
How do we grow a movement big enough to win nationally? It’s
some of the libertarian ideas that bring the right and left
together. Our way is eventually to get a bigger party, because we
need to become a bigger party if we want any chance of winning
nationally….There is a third [of voters] that is hardened on either side,
and there’s the third in the middle. I think, frankly, some of the
third in the middle would like to see more criminal justice reform
and a less harsh war on drugs. They acknowledge that the war on
drugs has had a racial outcome.
The Kentucky senator, who has introduced
legislation that would effectively abolish federal mandatory
minimum sentences (by letting judges ignore them in the interest of
justice), said he is trying to “make the penalties for mostly
nonviolent drug [offenses] less severe”:
Basically, don’t put people into jail for 10, 15 years. Let them
get back to work, let them expunge their records if they’ve served
their time, because if you don’t let people get back to work and
voting and all of the normal things you can do when you’re out of
prison, what is the likelihood that they go back to prison for the
same thing again? Some will say that’s a liberal idea. Well,
actually it’s a very conservative idea also. Prisons are very, very
expensive….You want prisons that separate out people who are a
danger to others. People who use drugs are a danger to themselves,
and we can argue what the penalty should be, but it shouldn’t be 10
or 15 years in jail….A lot of us are Christians, and we believe
in redemption and second chances.
Paul is fudging a bit when he makes it sound as if people
commonly serve 10 or 15 years merely for using drugs, although his
rhetoric on the subject is more sophisticated than it was a couple
of years ago, when he
referred to people “in jail for 20 years” for “smoking pot.” In
any case, it is clear from his passionate
criticism of mandatory minimums that his concerns about
excessive penalties extend to drug suppliers as well as drug users.
Paul also has talked about
shifting drug policy toward the states, which he says
should be free to legalize marijuana, although he does not
endorse that policy. Consistent with that position, he has
backed legislation aimed at preventing federal interference
with state laws allowing medical use of marijuana. This federalist
approach may help conservatives reconcile themselves to the idea
that somebody, somewhere is smoking pot he bought at a
state-licensed store. But if fully applied, it is tantamount to
repealing national prohibition. That is what the 21st Amendment
did, leaving alcohol policy to the states.
The radical implications of Paul’s federalism extend far beyond
drug policy, as became apparent toward the end of the Q&A
session in Dallas, when he was asked, “How can a transformative
presidency restore federalism?” His reply:
Well, you could obey Article 1, Section 8, which gives the
powers to the Congress. There’s about, depending on how you count
them, 17 or 19. Everything else should go back to the states. There
shouldn’t be a Department of Education. It should all be done in
Texas, all done in Tennessee, in Kentucky. You don’t need most of
these federal departments….Randy Barnett writes a lot about the Ninth and
10th amendments, where we’ve ignored both of them. The powers
that were given were specific and limited….The opposite side of
that is that the rights you have are numerous, infinite, and not
defined.
You could interpret the reference to Barnett, the Georgetown law
professor who wrote
Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of
Liberty, as a signal of reassurance to libertarians
disappointed by Paul’s ideological impurity. But to me it
seems like another example of the intellectual candor that
occasionally gets Paul into trouble (as it did when he expressed
reservations about the Civil Rights Act). It is one of his more
appealing qualities. Whether it amounts to anything in practice is
another question.
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