Read about Senator Rand Paul’s work in Washington under the Trump administration, and you’ll see the same words over and over: lonely, longshot, quixotic. The Kentucky Republican has staked out an unusual place in contemporary politics, supporting President Donald Trump while vocally criticizing some of his policies. Paul spoke with CT by phone this week. This interview has been edited and condensed.
Let’s start with questions of executive power and constitutional constraints, which have been a through line in many of the concerns you’ve raised lately around tariffs and national emergencies, war powers—particularly with Yemen—and free speech. How would you characterize the underlying problem connecting this array of issues?
I think it’s a longstanding problem. It didn’t just start with Donald Trump. Some look back to Woodrow Wilson; some look even further back, with the president gaining more and more power, and more and more power being centralized in the hands of the president. Our founders thought it was pretty important to divide the power. Madison talks about it in The Federalist Papers, saying we’ll pit ambition against ambition. The ambition to take and accumulate power will be checked by other people who won’t want to have their own power taken away.
But we have a largely acquiescent Congress that isn’t very ambitious and has let that power flow away from them for a long time. On war making, on tariffs—you name it—the presidency has gotten more and more powerful, and the executive branch bigger and bigger. It also happens on the regulatory front, in that most regulations are written by the executive branch bureaucracy but not by Congress anymore.
When there was a Democrat president, I had a much larger coalition of people who believed that the emergency powers were being abused. In fact, we had probably a dozen or more people cosponsoring a couple of different bills to restrain emergency powers. Unfortunately, I’m the only one left right now, now that there’s a Republican president.
But I still think the battle is important. And even though we don’t win legislatively, presenting the economic arguments for why tariffs are bad is important—but also presenting the constitutional arguments, because I think there will be at least some people in the public who will say, Well, yeah, we ought to be consistent, whether it’s a Republican or a Democrat in office.
It would be wonderful if the public persuasion pays off and in the long term we elect officials who are more concerned about the Constitution. But in the meantime, I know you’ve introduced, for instance, Joint Resolution 49, which would have terminated the national emergency declaration President Trump used to levy the 10 percent tariffs across the board. As you mentioned, nearly every other Senate Republican voted against it. So where do you go from here in the short term with the officials we have now? Is there any other tactic to take as a lawmaker?
We’re looking at whether or not there’s a way to take another crack at it. The emergency powers legislation, when it was reformed in 1976, allowed for a privileged vote. And we look at privileged votes as a way to force the debate. Most of the time, if there were not these privileged votes, you would never hear about these things at all because they would never come to the floor of the Senate.
So we will look carefully at that. We look at it with regard to war powers too. The War Powers Act also allows a privileged vote, and we’ve become quite active in that space over the years. Some years, I’ve gotten 50 amendment votes in a year—more than probably the entire rest of the caucus combined—because I utilize these privileged votes.
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We don’t often win—although I was remarking to somebody this morning that during the height of Saudi Arabia’s war with Yemen [in 2019], we did win a vote where we stopped arms sales to Saudi Arabia in the Senate and in the House, but then it was vetoed by President Trump.
I don’t think it was widely reported, but I think that’s the first time that Congress has ever attempted to stop arms sales or to stop a conflict by removing arms sales. Even at the height of the Vietnam War, I don’t think we ever defunded the war. So it was a big step forward even though it wasn’t successful.
And sometimes, like with the arguments right now over tariffs, a vote in Congress makes the argument broader. That brought it back into the press, and then the market responded by its downturn. And lo and behold, the Trump administration has backed away from their most extreme position on tariffs.
I remember that Yemen vote and being extremely disappointed by the veto. That was a remarkable thing in many ways. I wonder, did you see the recent comments from White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, where he was chatting casually with reporters and mentioned possibly suspending habeas corpus [the constitutional right to challenge any arrest or detention in court] to speed up deportations?
Yeah, I think that’s a horrible idea, and anybody who mentions that should probably go to a mandatory remedial constitutional class or something.
The idea of habeas corpus is old. They call it the ancient writ of habeas corpus. It dates to at least the Magna Carta in 1215. But likely even before that we had the idea that you had to present the body; you couldn’t just stow people away in a dungeon. Even kings were forced to bring people forward and say what you were charged with. It didn’t always work—sometimes the king just chopped their heads off anyway—but habeas corpus was one of the most civilizing rights in all of our history. So I’m disturbed that somebody would bring that up casually and talk about removing it.
Now a lot of people try to make this differentiation: We’re just going to remove it for foreigners. But the whole thing if you’re thrown in a dungeon is that we may not know who you are to begin with. You’ve had no process to present who you are or who you aren’t at that point.
I think we suspended habeas corpus under the war—the Civil War under President Lincoln. And there’s still many people in the libertarian side who criticize that. And I think I read somewhere that two other presidents did it, but I’m not sure who they were. Do you know who else suspended it?
I don’t know off the top of my head. [Editor’s note: Per the Constitution Center, Abraham Lincoln remains the only president to suspend habeas corpus on the national scale, but it was also suspended “in eleven South Carolina counties overrun by the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction; in two provinces of the Philippines during a 1905 insurrection; and in Hawaii after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.”] I did see people online making fun of that Trump-critical group, the Lincoln Project, because it was rightly upset about the Miller comments. But, of course, it’s named for Lincoln.
These are the kinds of things that we try to do our best to vocally oppose. And there’s a real danger, at least on our side, because [of] people like Donald Trump—and I like him in many ways. I’ve played golf with him a dozen times. I’ve supported him and continue to support the administration. But there’s a danger to a lockstep mentality where we don’t question anything because we’re in favor of someone. I think there is that real danger.
There are also people who quietly oppose things like this but are afraid of a primary challenge, and so they’re not very vocal anymore. That’s particularly true on trade. There are fewer people for trade anymore in the Republican caucus, but there’s at least 15 or 20 who will privately whisper, out of earshot of the media, that they still do believe trade is good.
The farm-state senators in particular have been told this for 50 years now. All the farm bureaus are for trade, and the farmers export about 20 to 25 percent of their crops. So that support for trade still exists, but there’s a fear of being vocal about it, and there’s a fear of pushing back on it. But I think someone has to.
Our readers are always curious about the faith of the people we speak with, so I want to ask you what faith looks like for you as a senator, both in general and in these very interesting times.
I am a Christian, became a Christian as a teenager. My wife and I attend church regularly, and she’s Christian as well. We raised our kids that way.
I see war as a terrible thing to almost always want to be avoided and to only be done in self-defense really. And so I am horrified by the violence of war and think we should be working overtime to try to prevent it, not just gleefully sending arms everywhere and being involved in every conflict, promoting one side or the other. I take seriously my religious belief that killing is wrong and try to apply it to policy.
Something I routinely grapple with as a writer who is both publicly Christian and very opinionated about politics is that I really have to think about when I’m taking a position, Is it just a matter of prudence? Is it just that I think this is the most efficient or cost-effective or whatever, but it’s something reasonable people can agree to disagree about? Or is it really an ethical matter, a right, a matter of truth and justice where my faith is more directly influential? And I would also say particularly in matters of war and peace, my faith is really stirring me to say, I think this is right and that is wrong and This is a question of morality and of justice. How do you think about that line between matters of prudence and matters of morality?
I think there are always gray areas, but I would say, for the most part, war and engagement in war should be about defense. I think it’s wrong to murder people, but there is a point at which if you come into my house and try to get my family, then I’ll shoot you. And so I’m not a pacifist, but at the same time, I can see very little other justification for shooting somebody.
The same is true of war. People say, Well, it’s in our defense to somehow to bomb Tehran or something. And I think that’s not something that’s defensive and not something that’s justified. And the practical aspect of it also is that it’ll lead to more war, more devastation. The whole Iraq War led to making Iran stronger, frankly, and made Iraq the worst place to live. Hundreds of thousands of people died. People died from not having medication, not having food.
So I think my approach to war and peace is a moral position, a profound belief personally held, that I think is important. And I think more people should consider that moral aspect. I think a lot of times people see war as a geopolitical thing: Communism’s bad. Ayatollahs are bad. We’re good. Democracy is good. And all those things are right—but are they justification for killing those people or for war?
And is there an end? Is there a proportionality to war? Israel was attacked on October 7, and it was horrific. Hamas deserves every condemnation, and Israel deserves the right to defend themselves. But is there a point at which it goes too far?
I also believe, though, that what Israel does—I’m not big on sending them tons of money in arms anyway; I think they need to provide for themselves at this point. But at the same time, I’m not thinking it’s my job to tell them when to stop either. Should they stop at some point? Have they passed that point? In all likelihood. But also, you know, I don’t live there. It is different living there. They have to make this decision. But I engage with it when it intersects with us. For instance, I don’t know if you saw that we had a committee hearing recently on this antisemitism bill. Did you see that?
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I did, yeah. I watched some of your comments, particularly about the uniqueness of the American free speech tradition, even compared to very historically and culturally similar countries like England.
That is one of the best debates we’ve had here. Bernie Sanders and I were on the same side at one point. I introduced the names of 479 Jewish American comedians whom I allege have made stereotypical comments and jokes about Jews—and that’s considered to be antisemitism under one of the definitions. [Editor’s note: The bill uses the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s Working Definition of Antisemitism.]
And then we also pointed out that another part of the definition is that you can’t say that Jews killed Jesus. And it’s like, well, there are people who are antisemitic who say all Jews are responsible, but if you read the Bible, [that some Jews were involved is] actually what happened. Of course, Jesus is Jewish, and he was killed by a group of Jews. Are we going to ban that kind of historical discussion somehow as being antisemitic?
It’s a big mistake to limit speech.
With this and with so many of the things we’ve touched on here, it seems to come down to a lack of basic foresight. Maybe something sounds like a great idea to you right now—while you’re in power and you get to apply it to the people and the words that you don’t like—but in the near future, it can be applied in other ways. It can be applied to restrict, for instance, as you say, discussion of Christian history.
You have to think about your opposites applying and using the same rules. If Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were to win the presidency and she uses emergency powers to say there’s a climate emergency and that we’re no longer going to drive gasoline-power cars, I think conservatives would not think that’s a great idea. But if you want to oppose her being able to do that unilaterally, you have to oppose the current president having that unilateral power as well.
