Rand Paul

• 1. Introduction

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  Rand Paul began speaking on the floor of the United States Senate on the 6th of March 2013, and he did not stop for 12 hours and 52 minutes. The occasion was the nomination of John O. Brennan to run the Central Intelligence Agency. Paul had no real hope of defeating it. He wanted an answer to a narrower question about the Obama administration's drone program. Could a drone ever be used against a noncombatant on American soil? Along the way he yielded the floor to several Republican colleagues and to one Democrat, Ron Wyden, who shared his concern. The Republican from Kentucky was a physician by training, and he had been in the Senate for barely two years. His own party's leaders would soon learn that his objections were not reserved for the other side. How did a doctor from Bowling Green become a senator, a presidential candidate and a regular obstacle to both parties? And what does it mean when he calls himself a constitutional conservative while others keep reaching for the word libertarian?

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• 2. Doctor from Texas

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  Randal Howard Paul was born on the 7th of January 1963 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the middle child of five. His father was Ron Paul, a physician who would become a long-serving congressman. As a boy he went by Randy, and his wife later shortened it to Rand. The name has nothing to do with Ayn Rand, though he read her work as a teenager alongside the Austrian economists his father admired. The family moved to Lake Jackson, Texas, in 1968. When Rand was 13, his father won election to the House, and the boy attended a Republican National Convention where Ron Paul headed Ronald Reagan's Texas delegation. At Brazoswood High School he swam and played defensive back. At Baylor University, from the fall of 1981 to the summer of 1984, he finished his pre-med requirements in two and a half years. He also joined the NoZe Brotherhood, a tongue-in-cheek secret society known for irreverent humor, and wrote for the student newspaper, The Baylor Lariat. He left Baylor without a bachelor's degree because Duke University School of Medicine, his father's alma mater, did not then require one. He earned his medical degree in 1988 and finished his residency in ophthalmology in 1993. That year he moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky, and joined Downing McPeak Vision Centers for five years. In 1998 he moved to the Graves Gilbert Clinic for a decade. In 2008 he opened his own practice across the street from his former employer, John Downing, and merged the two after his Senate election. Two malpractice suits were filed against him between 1993 and 2010. He was cleared in one, and the other was settled for $50,000. He specializes in cataract and glaucoma surgery, LASIK and corneal transplants. In 2009 he founded the Southern Kentucky Lions Eye Clinic to serve patients who cannot afford care, and the Lions Club International Foundation gave him its Melvin Jones Fellow Award. In April 2020, after recovering from COVID-19, he volunteered at a Bowling Green hospital. One chapter of his medical life drew sharper scrutiny. Paul earned certification from the American Board of Ophthalmology in 1995. In 1999 he incorporated the National Board of Ophthalmology as a cheaper rival. Its board consisted of Paul, his wife and his father-in-law, who served as secretary. The father-in-law later said of his role: "I never did go to any meetings... There was really nothing involved. It was more just a title than anything else, for me." By Paul's own estimate, 50 or 60 doctors were certified by it. Major accrediting bodies never recognized the board, and many hospitals and insurers considered its certificates invalid. Paul missed the paperwork for its 2000 renewal, recreated it in 2005, and watched it dissolve again in 2011. His medical license, however, has been valid without interruption or board action since June 1993.

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• 3. Tea Party Candidate

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  At Baylor, Paul led the local chapter of the Young Conservatives of Texas, and in 1984 he took a semester off to help his father's Republican Senate primary. Ron Paul lost that race to Phil Gramm. In 1991, angry that President George H. W. Bush had broken his promise not to raise taxes, Paul founded the North Carolina Taxpayers Union. In 1994 he started Kentucky Taxpayers United, which graded legislators on taxes and asked them to pledge to oppose increases. He has often called it the foundation of his work in state politics. A 2010 report in The Wall Street Journal found that the group had stopped issuing ratings after 2002 and had been dissolved by the state in 2000 over missing registration papers. In 1996 he managed his father's successful return to the House. In 2008 he knocked on doors in New Hampshire for his father's presidential bid, and he spoke at a Boston rally on the 234th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. The real opening came in early 2009, when supporters of Ron Paul tried to draft him to replace Senator Jim Bunning. On the 15th of April 2009, more than 700 people gathered in Bowling Green for a Tea Party rally, where Paul gave his first speech as a possible candidate. Bunning announced on the 28th of July that he would not seek reelection. Paul declared his own run on the 5th of August, facing Kentucky secretary of state Trey Grayson. On the 20th of August, supporters staged a fundraising event called a moneybomb, and the campaign took in $433,509 in 24 hours. A second moneybomb on the 23rd of September was themed as an Ultimate Fighting Championship bout between "We the People" and the "D.C. Insiders". The Paul camp painted Grayson as a career politician, and it ran an ad highlighting his admission that he once voted for Bill Clinton. On the 3rd of May 2010, the campaign announced that evangelical leader James Dobson had switched his endorsement from Grayson to Paul. Paul won the primary on the 18th of May with 59 percent of the vote to Grayson's 35 percent. The general election against attorney general Jack Conway drew $8.5 million from outside groups. It also got off to a rough start. Paul said he supported nine of the ten titles of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 but questioned the constitutionality of Title II. He later said he would have voted for the Act. He also drew criticism for calling the administration's comments about the Deepwater Horizon cleanup "un-American". On the 5th of January 2011 he was sworn in, on the same day his father was serving in the House.

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• 4. Spending and Blockades

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  Paul's first legislative proposal, in 2011, would have cut $500 billion from federal spending in a single year. It called for cutting the Department of Education by 83 percent and the Department of Homeland Security by 43 percent. It would have eliminated the Department of Housing and Urban Development and folded the Department of Energy into the Defense Department. That spring he voted against budget measures that his own party supported. On the 14th of April 2011, he was one of 19 senators to vote against a $38.5 billion cut that funded the government for the rest of the fiscal year, because it did not cut enough. In August he voted against raising the debt ceiling, and in September he called for a vote of no confidence in Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. His holds could target specific bills. In October 2011 he blocked a $36 million benefits bill for elderly and disabled refugees, after two alleged terrorists who entered through a refugee program were arrested in Bowling Green. He lifted the hold once Democratic leaders promised a hearing. In 2013 he said that bailing out Detroit would happen only "over my dead body". He also helped block a tax treaty with Switzerland, arguing that it would erode Americans' privacy. In May 2016, President Obama publicly asked him to stop blocking tax treaties that had been pending for years. In July 2019, he and Utah senator Mike Lee stopped a motion to renew the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. Paul said he wanted a vote on an amendment to offset the cost. The comedian Jon Stewart and 9/11 responder John Feal accused him of hypocrisy because he had backed the 2017 tax cut law, which increased the deficit. Paul called Stewart uninformed and part of a "left-wing mob". In September 2020, he was the lone Republican to oppose Mitch McConnell's COVID-19 aid package, citing the debt it would add. Paul also broke with his party on technology. In March 2023 he blocked Josh Hawley's bill to ban TikTok from United States government devices. He argued that a ban would violate First Amendment rights, a principle that runs through much of his record.

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• 5. Liberty and Surveillance

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  Attorney General Eric Holder answered Paul's drone filibuster in a letter that Press Secretary Jay Carney read aloud, saying the president had not used and would not use drone strikes against American citizens on American soil. Paul said he was "quite happy" with the reply. The Senate voted to end debate 81 to 16 and confirmed Brennan 63 to 34. In February 2014, Paul joined the Tea Party group FreedomWorks in a class action suit over the government's bulk collection of phone records. "I'm not against the National Security Agency, I'm not against spying," he said at a press conference, adding that he wanted investigators to get a warrant from a judge with an individual's name. Critics including law professor Alan Dershowitz called the suit a stunt. Paul's campaign said that names of people who signed up as possible participants would be kept in its database for future campaign use. A dispute also arose over whether attorney Bruce Fein had been paid for his work, which Fein said he had been. Paul has called Edward Snowden a whistleblower and urged the resignation of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. In 2014 he gave a speech at the University of California, Berkeley, titled "The N.S.A. vs. Your Privacy". Back in February 2011 he was one of two Republicans to vote against extending three provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act. On the 20th of May 2015, he spoke for ten and a half hours against renewing Section 215, and the provisions were not reauthorized on the 1st of June. Criminal justice became a signature priority. His bills included the Justice Safety Valve Act of 2013, the REDEEM Act of 2014 on sealing records, and the Police CAMERA Act of 2015 on body cameras. Another was the Justice for Breonna Taylor Act of 2020, which targeted no-knock warrants. He supported the First Step Act. In 2020 he held up a bill making lynching a federal crime, asking for an amendment about nonfatal injuries. On drugs, he introduced the CARERS Act in 2015 for medical cannabis and the Industrial Hemp Farming Act in 2013. He later proposed letting breakthrough therapies such as psilocybin and MDMA be rescheduled. A quieter cause was animal testing. With Senator Cory Booker, he sponsored the FDA Modernization Act 2.0, which President Biden signed in December 2022. When the FDA was slow to update its rules, Paul and Booker introduced a third version in January 2025.

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• 6. Foreign Policy Fights

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  In 2011, Paul proposed a budget with $542 billion in defense spending, and in 2015 he called for $697 billion. Unlike his father, he accepts a role for American forces abroad, including permanent bases. That did not stop Dick Cheney, John McCain and Rick Perry from calling him an isolationist. He objected to intervention in Libya and Syria on the grounds that Congress had not consented, and he later supported airstrikes against ISIS while questioning their constitutional basis. His stance on Russia shifted in 2014. At first he urged a respectful relationship and warned against pushing Ukraine toward NATO. Two weeks later, after Russia authorized force in Ukraine, he wrote that Putin must be punished for violating the Budapest Memorandum. He urged sanctions and expanded American oil and gas exports. In December 2014 he backed easing policy toward Cuba. On the 16th of March 2017, McCain accused Paul of acting as an agent of Vladimir Putin after Paul objected to adding Montenegro to NATO. Paul replied that McCain made "a really, really strong case for term limits". In July 2018, he called the Special Counsel investigation a "witch hunt", and the next month he traveled to Moscow and met Russian senators including Sergey Kislyak. He was one of two senators to vote against a Senate motion supporting NATO that July. He also broke with the Saudi alliance, becoming one of the first in Congress to oppose United States support for the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen in 2016. In January 2020 he said the strike that killed General Qasem Soleimani would raise tensions. On the 1st of July 2020, the Senate rejected his amendment to withdraw all forces from Afghanistan within a year. On the 12th of May 2022, he stopped a vote on a $40 billion Ukraine aid bill, asking for a special inspector general. Ukraine's Center for Countering Disinformation later placed him on a list of figures it says promote Russian propaganda. On Israel, he voted in January 2024 for a Bernie Sanders resolution on human rights provisions, which lost 72 to 11. In November 2024 he reversed and voted against a Sanders resolution on an arms sale. In February 2025 he criticized Trump's comment that America would take over the Gaza Strip, writing "I thought we voted for America First." In March 2026 he challenged the administration's justification for military action against Iran.

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• 7. Pandemic and Health Fights

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  On the 25th of January 2017, Paul introduced his own replacement for the Affordable Care Act. It offered a $5,000 tax credit and no coverage mandate. On the 2nd of March he was filmed knocking on a door on Capitol Hill, demanding to see the House repeal bill. On the 24th of March he thanked House conservatives for rebelling against "ObamaCare Lite". He golfed with Trump on the 2nd of April, and he told the president that repeal and replacement should be separate bills. In September 2017 he said Graham-Cassidy kept "90% of Obamacare". After Trump tweeted that whoever voted against it would be "the Republican who saved Obamacare", Paul said he would not be bullied. His vaccine remarks drew more attention. In 2009 he told Alex Jones that mandatory vaccination would be akin to martial law. On the 2nd of February 2015 he said most vaccines ought to be voluntary, then told CNBC that vaccines were "a good thing" but that "the state doesn't own your children". The next day he posted a photograph of himself being vaccinated. In 2014 he accused the CDC of downplaying Ebola. The pandemic put him at the center of hearings. On the 23rd of September 2020, he asked Anthony Fauci whether he had second thoughts about mask and distancing recommendations. Fauci replied that Paul had misconstrued the data and had done so repeatedly. In May 2020 Paul called stay-at-home orders "dictatorship" by Kentucky's Democratic governor Andy Beshear. In May 2021, he said he would not get the COVID vaccine because he had natural immunity. At hearings that summer he and Fauci clashed over the origin of the virus, and Fauci called him a liar. In August 2021, YouTube suspended him for a week over a video with false claims that masks are ineffective. On the 26th of February 2020, his wife, Kelley Paul, bought between $1,000 and $15,000 of Gilead Sciences stock. Paul disclosed it 16 months after the legal deadline, and his office said the form was filled out but never submitted. On the 10th of October 2023, he published Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up with Regnery Publishing.

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• 8. Plagiarism and Presidential Run

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  In October 2013, Paul quoted almost word for word from an online reference article about the film Gattaca in a speech backing Virginia candidate Ken Cuccinelli, with no credit. More examples followed, including his Tea Party rebuttal to the 2013 State of the Union. A three-page passage of his book Government Bullies came from a Heritage Foundation article. When an op-ed on mandatory minimums matched an article in The Week, The Washington Times dropped his weekly column. Paul said he was held to an "unfair standard" and promised to restructure his office. Yet the prominence was real. On the 13th of February 2013, he delivered the Tea Party response while Marco Rubio gave the official one, and some pundits dated the 2016 race from that night. He won the Conservative Political Action Conference straw poll for three straight years, and Time listed him among the 100 most influential people in 2013 and 2014. At the GOP Freedom Summit in April 2014, he said the party could not be one of "fat cats, rich people and Wall Street". He announced his candidacy on the 7th of April 2015 and raised $1 million within a day. A Kentucky law barred him from running for president and the Senate at once. The Republican state Senate passed a fix in 2014, but the Democratic House declined it, and Democrats kept their 54-46 majority. He suspended his campaign on the 3rd of February 2016 after finishing fifth in Iowa. He was critical of Trump during the primary but later became one of his closest allies, while still voting against some Trump nominees and proposals. By August 2018, FiveThirtyEight found he had voted with Trump's positions 74 percent of the time, the least among Republicans. After the 2020 election, he claimed it was stolen, then accepted the state-certified electors. During Trump's second impeachment he moved to declare the trial unconstitutional, and the motion failed 55 to 45. In January 2024 he launched a site called Never Nikki, an anti-endorsement of Nikki Haley, without endorsing anyone else. In 2019 he signed a pledge for a two-term limit, yet he won a third term in 2022. When Mitch McConnell retires in 2027, Paul is set to become Kentucky's senior senator.

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