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Rand’s Reforms: The Ricochet Survey
Here’s a protip for the approaching presidential campaign season: when the candidates take to the stump, always read the transcript rather than watching the speech. I adopted this technique during the 2008 presidential campaign, when it simply became too arduous to sit through 75 minutes of mass hysteria (and at least one audience member fainting) to get through 15 minutes worth of Barack Obama’s cotton candy remarks.
The transcripts are clarifying. You’re not distracted by the delivery or the audience dynamics. You’re essentially alone with the candidate and his thoughts. And, nine times out of ten, you’re going to be disappointed — because the vast majority of these guys don’t have much to say.
Now, I don’t especially blame them for this. Running for the presidency in the modern era often dictates hiding the ball (the 2008 Obama campaign is a textbook example of this). But it does make mining the transcripts an interesting exercise. You’ll often discover that dozens of paragraphs worth of rhetoric only yield two or three concrete proposals.
There was a little more meat than that to the speech Rand Paul gave in Louisville earlier today kicking off his presidential campaign—although not much. The speech was clearly focused a lot more on constructing Paul’s personal narrative than delivering a coherent policy manifesto. That said, there were several specific proposals embedded in the remarks. For your edification, I’ve included them below. Let us know what you think in the comments.
Balanced Budget Amendment
Congress will never balance the budget unless you force them to do so. Congress has an abysmal record with balancing anything. Our only recourse is to force Congress to balance the budget with a constitutional amendment.
Term Limits
I have been to Washington, and let me tell you, there is no monopoly on knowledge there.
I ran for office because we have too many career politicians. I believe it now more than ever.
We limit the President to two terms. It’s about time we limit the terms of Congress!
Reading Legislation
I want to reform Washington. I want common sense rules that will break the logjam in Congress.
That’s why I introduced a Read the Bills Act.
The bills are thousands of pages long. And no one reads them. They are often plopped on our desks only a few hours before a vote.
I’ve proposed something truly extraordinary — Let’s read the bills, every page!
The bills are 1,000 pages long and no one reads them. They are often plopped on our desk with only a few hours before a vote, so I propose something truly extraordinary. Let’s read the bills every day.
Economic Freedom Zones
Politically connected crones get taxpayer dollars by the hundreds of millions and poor families across America continue to suffer. I have a different vision, an ambitious vision, an ambitious vision, a vision that will offer opportunity to all Americans, especially those who have been left behind.
My plan includes economic freedom zones to allow impoverished areas like Detroit, West Louisville, Eastern Kentucky to prosper by leaving more money in the pockets of the people who live there.
Repatriation Tax and Infrastructure
I want to see millions of Americans back at work. In my vision for America, we’ll bring back manufacturing jobs that pay well. How? We’ll dramatically lower the tax on American companies that wish to bring their profits home.
More than $2 trillion in American profit currently sits overseas. In my vision for America, new highways and bridges will be built across the country, not by raising your taxes, but by lowering the tax to bring this American profit home.
School Choice (This is not a selective excerpt — this is all Senator Paul said on the matter)
Those of us who have enjoyed the American dream must break down the wall that separates us from the other America. I want all our children to have the same opportunities that I had. We need to stop limiting kids in poor neighborhoods to failing public schools and offer them school choice.
Iran Negotiations
We’ve brought Iran to the table through sanctions that I voted for. Now we must stay strong. That’s why I’ve cosponsored legislation that ensures that any deal between the U.S. and Iran must be approved by Congress.
Not — not only is that good policy, it’s the law.
It concerns me that the Iranians have a different interpretation of the agreement. They’re putting out statement that say completely the opposite of what we’re saying. It concerns me that we may attempt, or the president may attempt, to unilaterally and prematurely halt sanctions.
I will oppose any deal that does not end Iran’s nuclear ambitions and have strong verification measures.
And I will insist that the final version be brought before Congress.
Foreign Aid
It angers me to see mobs burning our flag and chanting “Death to America” in countries that receive millions of dollars in our foreign aid.
I say it must end. I say not one penny more to these haters of America.
Domestic Surveillance
To defend our country, we do need to gather intelligence on the enemy. But when the intelligence director is not punished for lying under oath, how are we to trust our government agencies?
Warrantless searches of Americans’ phones and computer records are un-American and a threat to our civil liberties.
I say that your phone records are yours. I say the phone records of law-abiding citizens are none of their damn business.
Is this where we light up the phones?
The president created this vast dragnet by executive order. And as president on day one, I will immediately end this unconstitutional surveillance.
In addition, Paul also closed the speech with passing references to envisioning “an America where criminal justice is applied equally and any law that disproportionately incarcerates people of color is repealed” and “an America with a restrained IRS that cannot target, cannot harass American citizens for their political or religious beliefs.”
How about it, Ricochet? What do you think? Quibbles? Critiques? Suggestions? Unbridled adulation?
Published in Politics
Again, that ignores the many other petty crime law enforcement disproportionately enforces of people of color.
I like the repatriation tax stuff.
I’m fine with BBAs. I’m more than a little concerned by any Presidential campaign who places his highest priorities as Constitutional Amendments. We’re not in a place where partisan Amendments are plausible, and the President doesn’t have a lot to do with them.
Nor, for that matter does the President have a lot to do with the Rules of the Senate or the Rules of the House.
If Paul wants to reform the Senate such that laws get read out there, then he’s in the darn senate right now. His closest ally is the Majority Leader! If you like this idea, and like Paul, then you need to vote against him in the primary to keep him in the Senate where he could enact it far more easily than from the White House.
I’m somehow not shocked that the libertarians who howled in outrage on Federalist grounds when Romney supported school choice as a federal matter are instead happy when Paul does it.
I think he’s confused about executive agreements. If Obama wants a treaty to become part of American law, he needs to get Congress to consent to a treaty (since Washington, no one has asked for advice and happily I don’t get the impression that Paul wants to start) or pass a law. Since no one needs the US to be bound by any law in this situation, Obama’s just giving his personal word. I never know how far people feel like this limitation on his agreements with other leaders goes; if he wants to go to India, and have Modi come to Washington, does he need the Senate to agree? Most of his commitment here is to not police Iran and afflict them with sanctions. How on earth could Senate inaction force him to act? Still, this is a longer topic that I should have addressed in other threads. Unless he means what he says, that the law he co-sponsored but which has not passed is not just policy, but is the law, in which case I think his confusion is clearer. Whatever the case, I’d prefer to disagree with him on this relatively abstract ground than on his pro-Iran/ Obama position of a few months back.
I don’t know what he means with the foreign aid bit: when the opposition marches in the streets and declares their enmity to America, does Paul plan to reward them by helping them topple their government? Is there a hidden meaning here? Does it apply to emergency aid, tsunamis and such? To aid pursuant to treaties?
I guess it might be good to have a substantive discussion of NSA stuff, but I think this speech exemplifies why Paul is a barrier, not a help, to that happening. The slogans drown out the substance. Obviously, Paul isn’t going to protect all the phone records of all law abiding people, and making that the standard just shows that he’s not keen to debate the details. Much as he suggests when he starts his economic analysis by looking to amend the Constitution.
TL;DR
There’s a lot of pandering, snake oil portrayals of issues, and hyperbole there. I’ve seen him give wonkier speeches, and I hope that he returns to them, but this doesn’t make me feel hopeful about the debates or the tone of the campaign. To give credit, he’s upbeat, focused on the Democrats, and positive, each of which is important, and I am disappointed by the speech only because I already rated Paul pretty highly.
Right, but by your own admission, Paul wasn’t talking about that stuff. It was just a cloak for legalization.
If this is true, then it’s far worse than what Fred said. This would imply that Paul had zero knowledge of or interest in the Constitution. The feds trying to repeal state laws is one thing. If Paul wants to examine the racial impact of municipal laws and repeal stuff passed by a town council, but keeps the support of constitution Libertarians, he’s a Gary Johnson level master of that art.
I think he just meant drugs, though.
Well, I don’t speak for Paul, not can I read his mind. And his extensive record on this area should make his comments very clear.
I thought you, Troy, Marci, and others made my arguments excellently. I’d add that the career civil servant bureaucracy leans to the left of Congress, so I’d rather the law-as-applied was written by Congress as a partisan matter, but other than that I didn’t see what I could add except “thank you to you guys for making me seem eloquent by restating my views in a pithier and more informed way and implying that I could take credit”.
I’m not sure I follow. Can you link to a summary of his extensive record on this area? Or write one, with links to the legislation?
These rollout speeches are not the formal platform, and there are good reasons to hold the brilliant ideas back until the right moment.
I just hope that is what the candidates are planning to do.
Right, but it’s a shame when the promises in the rollout are so heavily weighted toward false ones. He can’t repeal bad local laws (if that’s what he’s saying; I’m not sure I follow Fred’s argument about the obvious meaning). He’s not going to pass a term limit Amendment. He’s not going to end all surveillance.
Wrong, you can address them procedurally. The most effective clauses in the constitution are those that empower one branch to check another. The clauses that try to constrain the state with just words are less effective (a judge or bureaucrat finds a way to weasel around them).
Good changes would be:
1) The Regulation Freedom Amendment
This is very powerful. EPA carbon regs? gone. ATF ammo bans? gone. Executive amnesty? gone.
2) Give a majority of state legislatures the power to repeal federal laws or object to federal regulations like in #1.
Sure, when you’re talking about checks and balances. For the same reason, I’m sympathetic to the kind of efforts for Congress to take power back from the administrative state that you describe.
That’s not what’s at issue here. Limiting the length of bills, forcing people to read them, etc. are proposals aimed at getting legislators to stop using their legitimate powers foolishly. There’s no procedural remedy available there because it’s ultimately a matter of judgment.
Compare Bush’s announcement speech in 1999.
He said he’d dramatically expand free trade, which he did.
He said he’d cut taxes, which he did.
He said he’d enact tort reform, which he did (albeit mostly in his second term).
He said he’d rebuild American military power, and that he’d have a foreign policy with a touch of iron. I believe he did that.
He said that his actions in this wouldn’t be driven by the polls. Gotcha.
He said he’d deregulate the field for faith based charities, which he did.
And he said he’d pass something like NCLB, which he did.
All of that was plausible stuff that a President might do. He outlined why he wanted it and why he was running for President.
The one thing I’m not sure about is that he said he’d give schools more power to discipline kids. I don’t know if that’s in NCLB, or some other measure he passed, in something he failed to pass, or if he changed his mind.
Broadly, though, he stood up, said why he was running for President, laid out his platform, noted that he was a good guy that people should vote for, and sat down again. It’s a pretty great speech.
But the current situation is laughably long bills that cede implementation details and 4-lane highways to Hell of interpretation to the Executive. Look no further than Dodd-Frank and weep. We now have the worst of both worlds. Shorter bills. Make the bastards be poets. Besides, isn’t thinking things through on paper and at length the sign of a not very bright college sophomore.
Part of my bias here is that I use to play role playing games. In particular, I used to enjoy White Wolf games (a particular publisher). This meant that I voluntarily played a game, with others of like mind, that had about 80 volumes of rules to it, some of them softback, some of them hardback, but none shorter than a hundred and something pages and most longer. I played as part of a club, and, like every other similar club, we had our own expansions and codas to those rules. We also had constant and long running debates about ambiguities left uncovered. Emergent systems are intrinsically complex, and regulating them in a predictable, consistent, fashion requires voluminous rules.
I’m often told when I’m in the UK that the lack of information on the views of politicians isn’t a problem. If I want to know what one thinks, I should just ask them. Because they have many fewer constituents than Congressmen, the point isn’t 100% absurd. In a system where people know the judges/ regulators, you can pass a lot of simple bills, and that happened through the 19th century in the US.
It’s actually kind of freedom enhancing to be able to look up the law, though, rather than having to ask the relevant politicians what their read is. It’s also helpful in defeating corruption; you can’t eliminate bureaucratic discretion, but you can reduce it.
For a look at how things used to work, spend some time looking through the New Deal statutes. Laws of similar length would set up a new government agency with a remit vague enough to do more or less whatever it wanted and would set up an orphanage. In both cases, legislators trusted the bureaucrats to do more of less the right thing. I’m not as fearful of the civil service as some are here, but I’m very glad indeed that that’s not the approach taken today.
We do currently have poets in that kind of role. Lawrence v Texas was poetry. It’s beautiful to people who like that sort of thing, and you can read all kinds of inspiration in it. Some people think that it was a radical reform of the Constitution, affecting everything from gun laws to traffic codes. Some people think it’s basically limited to the case before it.
Poetic law may be beautiful, but it’s a deadly beauty. Of the things I want from my tax code as applied to a partnership I run with my brother for which the chief asset is the impressive reputation he built for years in Florida at great expense, but where most of the profits this year arose in Texas, a fun read is not high on the list. I want to have the law be as clear as possible about how my assets and liabilities are classified, so I can work out what I need to pay and who I need to pay it to.
For anyone named Paul, yawn.
Good to read this. I never liked listening to GW speak for some reason. I have no idea why. It was just a poor personality fit. So I have collection of GW’s speeches on my computer. They are works of art. Anyone who thought GW wasn’t smart can’t read. :) His father’s speeches were clear too. Which is why everyone used them to nail him constantly. It is a responsible person who says, “I will do this.” Unfortunately for that person, it’s also holding up a “Hit Me” sign.
In contrast (I wish I could find the link to this hilarious story), an English professor at Yale gave his class John Kerry’s nomination acceptance speech to outline. The students started out in earnest and after five minutes said with exasperation that it couldn’t be done.
Aren’t policy proposals just carefully crafted word arrangements? Don’t instincts tell us more?
Senator Paul’s instinct was to side with Obama and against Cuban-American Senate colleagues Rubio and Cruz on Cuba policy. Shouldn’t he have consulted with them before riding solo on this issue?
Senator Paul talks about liberty, but the Castros have imposed a liberty-free totalitarian regime on Cubans for decades through total gun control and alliances with America’s enemies.
When Senator Paul’s instinct is a coup d’etat to liberate Cuba, I will listen to whatever else he has to say.
Until then he is dead to me.
Long bills versus short bills: here is my professional opinion. I edit books. There’s that. But also, for about nine years, I was part of a group that was involved in a complicated lawsuit and legal action against the EPA and the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority. I spent a lot of time in the local Barnstable legislative law library. As an editor, I was appalled at the poor condition of the laws and bills and histories I was reading day in and day out. I saw so many errors and inconsistencies in wording and citations. Cross-references that were inaccurate. It absolutely drove me crazy.
We human beings frame work in terms of what we can do well and correctly. The old-timers would say, “You don’t bite off more than you can chew.”
Congress needs an army of editors, for sure. And a second army of fact checkers. These laws are important, and they should be written correctly.
Okay, maybe bills need to be longer than a paragraph. But maybe an editable unit would be two hundred pages.
What they are doing now is the very definition of tyranny: they say one thing on page 2 and something entirely different on page 4.
That’s my opinion.
The biggest law I own a copy of (my jumbo telephone directory style copy of the NAFTA) is a work of art.
I fully agree that more editing would be helpful; this is an area where technology can be handy, too.
You’ll not find a keener advocate for increasing the legislative budget than me on Ricochet. Chopping bills up, though, makes that harder. You’re then coordinating with the other parts of the reform that you think will be in place, rather than being able to be confident.
Your comment is funny, actually. Here’s one way to look at the difference: I was looking at laws written by liberals. You were looking at laws written by conservatives. :)
I don’t know the history of NAFTA.
But I know that the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act and Affordable Care Act were “omnibus bills,” meaning that they were cobbled together from previously existing, often poorly conceived and written, legislation. That’s where a lot of the terminology and cross-referencing issues arise.
The Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act and the EPA-enabling act (I’ve forgotten the name of the act that put it together) have been amended many times. It’s really a chore to trace elements in the bills to their most recent iterations. The indexing is pretty poor. Again, please, Congress, hire a professional. Good indexers are worth their weight in gold.
(The best resource on the Internet I know of for federal acts is maintained by Cornell University Law School, in case anybody ever wants a definitive source for the names of acts.)
Congress and/or the Executive Branch would blow off a BBA with the same panache the current bumbler-in-chief blows off the rest of the Constitution. The dirty little secret in our system is that the Constitution doesn’t defend itself and, when the American people returned the bumbler to office for a second term, they blew any chance of restoring the republic for a generation.
Having lived in, or knowing that one will return to, the real world is the best curb on the kind of irresponsible nonsense we’ve seen in bills like the Unaffordable Care Act and Dodd-Frankenstein. Who knew that the key to good health care was to adjust the premiums of gay men to include coverage for pregnancy, pap smears, and mammograms? Or to budget and mandate criminal prosecution of financial institutions for making unsound loan decisions mandated by that same federal government in the name of fairness. Steal from the ant, give to the grasshopper, and serve hard time for doing what I made you do. Sweet.
The complaint is totally valid. It is not like the member will ever read the bill, but their staff will. There are rules in the Senate that allow members to force the reading of bills from the floor. It doesn’t matter. The bills are written in gobbledygook that out reference critical portions to obscure documents and legislation and defer critical policy question to civil servants explicitly blowing off Congress’ legislative responsibility in favor of hard core, unaccountable Washingtonistas.
Paul’s solution here is a puerile insult to the intelligence of his audience, and would be disqualifying in a serious republic. Members are largely beyond the laws we live under. Any Capitol policeman who hasn’t had to issue a formal apology to a member and received a harsh reprimand for interfering that member’s right to run barricades, drive stoned, throw punches, etc., isn’t doing his job. Any Capitol policeman who has to issue too many apologies is an ex-Capitol policeman. How do you enforce any such thing in that very corrupt and corrupting environment? And is Rand running for President or Majority Leader? The Executive has only the bully pulpit available to urge any such change.
Saying Detroit and Economic Freedom Zone and then moving on shows no concept of the problem, or the dilemma of a collapsed and, of course, corrupt government that has finally driven off captive commerce through draconian inanities leaving the retired and retiring public servants without the necessary deep pockets to tax to pay for their country club dues. Retirement commitments for public employees have been made on an unrealistic basis for many decades, and jurisdictions like Detroit are now buried in the debris of bankrupt policies. Freedom zones will not fulfill those “solemn commitments” to public servants, leaving retirees and their lawyers and those execrable judges protecting the sanctity of these corrupt deals to loudly cry foul and insist on special exemptions, Congressional action, and other emergency action to circumvent the useful visual of civil servants stewing in the juices of their own market decisions with regard to where they should work.
American companies now routinely fund operations through debt in this country while shifting profits to jurisdictions that are far less hostile to profits. Big surprise. It costs us corporate spending in the domestic market, it costs us jobs, it costs us economic growth, it suppresses small business. Paul did not stomp on this problem nearly hard enough, but he positioned himself clearly for the primaries.
I agree, but it should not be a federal decision. Dissolving the Department of Education and unraveling the labyrinth of related regulations choking our local school districts with federal driven unfunded mandates would be a huge first step. Republicans dominate the local governments now, and should be doing this everywhere they have influence. If they are not, they should be punished harshly at the polls for being the useless dodos their critics insist they are–selling policies they never seriously intended to inact.
Rand, not all international agreements rise to the level of a treaty. When the President offers Iran an agreement supported only by the Executive branch, he offers a very short term agreement that would only be honored beyond Obama’s term only by the election of another deeply anti-American, anti-Western bumbler.
And foreign governments always announce different, sometimes substantially different, interpretations of agreements during negotiation and after agreement and passage. The fact that the bumbler has shown no concern for being caught lying by the American people (if you like your health insurance…) means that any bumbler representation of anything is DOA anyway. Why soft peddle this fact?
Finally, this is a perfectly doctrinaire defense by a senator of the prerogatives of the Senate, excesses, timidity, and all. And a pleasant surprise coming from a candidate whose foreign policy statements have often been idiosyncratic at best.
So we will cut off financial arrangements with France and Germany and England, where speech is sufficiently free to permit such spectacle on a regular basis? I am sure Mr. Paul is thinking of authoritarian regimes where such demonstrations are not free speech but mandated speech, and I tend to agree in the general, but particulars matter. Let’s not continue trading Shahs for Mullahs, Mubareks for Muslim Brotherhoods, or surrendering Iraqs and Afghanistans to monster regimes like Iran.
I totally agree. We need to thoughtfully transition to a regimen that respects and restores civil rights while supporting the turnaround of rightful requests in hours, not days or weeks. Any system that can be abused will be abused, the abusers will not give up their abuses easily, and it usually takes years or decades for serious abuses to come to light. Kill it now, we may never get another chance.
This was another piece of disqualifying stupidity. Criminal justice must pursue the evidence and be held to high standards fairness, but the notion of ethnic quotas for incarceration is appallingly stupid on its face. This is a craven creature of Congress speaking, not a serious reformer. Perhaps he is overreacting to his father’s black eye from publishing in explicitly racist forums? Jack Dunphy does a nice job stomping on this imbecility.
From Mr. Paul’s mouth to God’s ear.
The foreign policy turn was limited but welcome. He is stuffed full of Washington sensibilities, whicj is to say Washington nonsense, he may not even know he has, as evidenced by his remarks on criminal justice, school choice, and reading legislation. He would have to learn much to become a serious leader. That zero executive experience thing means that I would rank Walker and Perry ahead, but his defects are less alarming than the prospects of a fourth Bush term.
I would like to suggest that it is not the length as such, but the opacity. I have had to work with omnibus bills from the implementation side in places like State HQ and the Pentagon and that meant buying the right lawyer lunch on more than a few occasions. The obfuscation serves the purpose of blunting substantive criticism and intimidating the uninitiated from even trying to seriously understand, much less criticize, their government.
If you have an IQ above 120 and cannot unravel a bill, the fault is with your legislators not yourselves. It’s a guild mentality, creating vocational mysteries to bamboozle the uninitiated and lord it over the proselytes.
On the time issue: I would support House and Senate rules requiring that any bill be published for one business day per thousand words before it is brought to the floor, with a 2/3 override on a published member vote. This would allow a genuinely urgent bill to be passed while preventing the bull rush of an Unaffordable Care Act.
Sisyphus: You would get my vote. I like that plan.
I like this a LOT – but how does it become law instead of merely a convenient rule to be waived?
The waiving issue I must refer to the appropriate parliamentarians, though I will note that the Senate lets a single senator tangle u all manner of things single-handed. This rule would give such a place to hang their hat. Otherwise, I have an unending line of derision and ridicule to aid any late night hosts in pillorying any miscreants doing so. No need to shuffle through the 2/3rds at that level after all, just the Speaker and Majority Leader. None of them can touch Johnny Carson, but it doesn’t take much to drive such egotists to distraction.
I’ve taken a couple of classes studying capital adequacy requirements for banks. I don’t think I’ve met anyone who found the economics easy and the law hard, but I’ve found plenty of people who found the law hard.
For many such specialized fields (and most Federal law deals with specialized, technical, stuff), you don’t need a high IQ, but you do need training, to understand the subject material. I think it’s fair to say that you can rarely understand the law without understanding its subject, and that this means that some law has to be hard to understand.
I agree that budgeting is highly complex and that sometimes the opacity is intentional (although I don’t think that the majority of the complexity is intentional). Most citizens lack an intimate familiarity with the org chart for the Pentagon and the simplest of English wouldn’t mean that they could easily follow all the financial flows; analytically following the accounts for an unfamiliar company can be hard, too.
I agree that we could improve on the clarity, but I’m not sure we could bring it to the point where a layman could quickly look at the guts of the law and immediately understand its implications outside of the simplest of laws dealing with the most familiar subjects.
I think this is a pretty good rule, and is just the sort of thing that I’d support Rand supporting if he stays in the Senate. I’m not big on the idea of a President trying to tell Congress how its internal governance should work.