What gets lost is that the Republican Party has always been the party of civil rights and voting rights.
Rand PaulI worry that the Senate is working to consider a series of little-noticed provisions in comprehensive immigration reform that may provide a pathway to a national ID card for all individuals present in the United States - citizens and noncitizens.
Rand PaulDemocrats in Louisville were led by Courier-Journal editor Henry Watterson and were implacably opposed to blacks voting.
Rand PaulWho gets to decide who's an enemy combatant and who's an American citizen? Are we really so frightened and so easily frightened that we would give up a thousand-year history?
Rand PaulI have allowed the president to pick his political appointees…But I will not sit quietly and let him shred the Constitution.
Rand PaulI can tell you who's planning terroris attacks. The leaders of ISIL. And I can tell you where they're at. They're in Raqqa, Syria. So for God's sakes, Mr. President Barack Obama , change your strategy. Come up with a ground force to go in and destroy the caliphate before we get hit here at home. That would be my advice to you.
Rand PaulI think we can all agree [Bashar] Assad is a bad and evil actor, but I'm not so sure that we want the Islamic rebels to be in charge of Syria either.
Rand PaulWe do not project power from bankruptcy court. We're borrowing a million dollars a minute.
Rand PaulJust because a couple people on the Supreme Court declare something to be 'constitutional' does not make it so.
Rand PaulReally, while gas is an awful thing to watch - the death is painful - to even watch these deaths - it's also bad to die from a bullet, a hand grenade, or a machete.
Rand PaulI just can't vote to go to war unless I think there's a real clear-cut American purpose in the war, that we're going to win and that we're not going fight for stalemate.
Rand PaulNobody ever was fired for 9/11. Instead of firing the people who didn't do a good job, we gave them medals. The guy who did a good job, I don't know what happened to him. And what we did was we decided we'd just collect everybody's information. That we'd sort of scrap the Bill of Rights.
Rand PaulPerhaps it is time to be more careful what we ask government to do, and where we allow it to become part of our lives.
Rand PaulIf I were to look at foreign policy, I would say John McCain has been wrong on just about everything over the last four decades.
Rand PaulI think the entire world knows, and North Korea knows, that if they used any weapons on our soldiers they would be obliterated. And it would be an overwhelming response.
Rand PaulAny time we give people the ability to use force, we have to be very careful. It's sort of like the people who spy on us - you've got to watch the watchers.
Rand PaulI won't support any budget, whether it's a Republican or a Democrat budget, that doesn't lead to balance.
Rand PaulThe source of the problem is in Syria. Raqqa is the headquarters of ISIL, which is a lethal terrorist organization, now army. If you don't go after them over there, they're going to hit us over here, and there's no substitute for that in my view.
Rand PaulI'm a Reagan conservative. Reagan did negotiate with the Soviets. But you have to negotiate from a position of strength.
Rand PaulI think there's evil on both sides [of Syria], and I think that's one reason I don't want to be involved in civil war. I see things in personal terms. I just can't see sending one of my sons - or your son or daughter - to fight in a civil war, where on one side we have a dictator, who in all likelihood gassed his people.
Rand PaulIf there were an ounce of courage in this body I would be joined by other senators… saying they will not tolerate this.
Rand PaulWe should not have drug laws or a court system that disproportionately punishes the black community.
Rand PaulI think you'll find that these are measures that have great bipartisan support, and so I expect, not only did we do well in the primary, I think we'll win by a wide margin in the fall because we're going to get a lot of independents and conservative Democrats coming to us.
Rand PaulIn 1997, I, along with 200 other young ophthalmologists formed the National Board of Ophthalmology to protest the American Board of Ophthalmology's decision to grandfather in the older ophthalmologists and not require them to recertify.
Rand PaulI'm not opposed to letting people work and labor in our country, but we shouldn't provide an easy route to citizenship. We're the only country I know of where a person can come in illegally and that baby becomes a citizen and I think that should stop also.
Rand PaulIf someone has Ebola at a cocktail party they're contagious and you can catch it from them.
Rand PaulThe insurance companies make about $15 billion a year. They have doubled their profit margin under Obamacare. And so now we're going to take a lot of this and call it a stabilization fund, but really it's a bailout of insurance companies. And I just think that's wrong. I just can't see why ordinary, average taxpayers would be giving money to very, very wealthy corporations. An analogous situation would be this: We all complain that new cars cost too much. Why don't we have a new car stabilization fund and give $130 billion to car companies?
Rand PaulI think we can't be naive in dealing with the Russians or dealing with the Syrians. But at the same time, I think we could try to encourage - and I think this is what diplomacy should do - encourage the self-interests of all parties to believe that it is in their best interest to get evil actors or rogue actors such as Syria or Iran, if you try to have less belligerent and less bellicose behavior.
Rand PaulI think there is some overreach in the sense that the EPA now says: if Congress doesn't pass greenhouse emissions regulations or testing, we'll simply do it on our own. I think that's an arrogance of a regulatory body run amok.
Rand PaulThe one way, possibly, out of this is for [Bashar] Assad to abdicate and plead, perhaps to Russia or somewhere else. Would save another wave of civilian casualties if we could get him to abdicate.
Rand PaulBecause Republicans believe that the federal government is limited in its function-some have concluded that Republicans are somehow inherently insensitive to minority rights. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Rand PaulI think that there is a bipartisan consensus that's incorrect that we should have the whole world be in NATO. For example, if we had Ukraine and Georgia in NATO - and this is something McCain and the other neocons have advocated for - we would be at war now because Russia has invaded both of them.
Rand PaulIt's curious that only in Washington can you spend $2 billion and claim that you're saving money.
Rand PaulWell, there’s 10 - there’s 10 different - there’s 10 different titles, you know, to the Civil Rights Act, and nine out of 10 deal with public institutions. And I’m absolutely in favor of one deals with private institutions, and had I been around, I would have tried to modify that.
Rand PaulThe Paris attack was highly sophisticated, well-planned, very clever, took months in the making, very much like 9/11. And there is a 9/11-style attack coming to America.
Rand PaulLet's make the haystack smaller. Let's say for a while, until we can figure out who's coming, who's going, and who's overstayed their visa, let's have extra scrutiny and figure out what's going on, because there's a whole segment of the world that is intent on sending people here to attack us.
Rand Paul