Is Rand Paul, Libertarian/Republican, following the teabaggers lead and showing some racism with his statement on the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Can you imagine if the problems with segregation, the horrific acts of hate against minorities, were left up to the states and there was no Civil Rights Act? I truely believe some states in our country would be conducting business as if it were 1950. Racism is alive and well in the USA.
I think Pauls extreme Libertarian views are far from main stream and Democrats will have no problem winning the Senate race in Kentucky come November. Teabaggers think they are on a roll, but I think otherwise.
Ezra Klein from The Washington Post says this....
It's safe to say Rand Paul's first few days as the Republican nominee for the open Senate seat in Kentucky are not going well. When you can't answer the question "Should [the] Woolworth lunch counter have been allowed to stay segregated? Sir, just yes or no," it's fair to say you're off-message.
Over at Right Now, Dave Weigel offers up the generous and, I think, correct interpretation of Paul's opposition to the parts of the Civil Rights Act that desegregated private businesses. "Paul believes, as many conservatives believe, that the government should ban bias in all of its institutions but cannot intervene in the policies of private businesses." And Weigel is right that this is not an unknown belief among conservatives: I've had this argument with some of my libertarian friends, and libertarians occasionally have this argument among one another.
So I take Paul at his word that he's not a racist. What he is, however, is an ideological extremist. He is so categorically opposed to public regulation of private enterprise that he cannot even bring himself to say that the Woolworth lunch counter should've been desegregated. Instead, he falls back on the remedies of the market: "I wouldn't attend, wouldn't support, wouldn't go to," a private institution that discriminates, he told Rachel Maddow. But he would let them discriminate. And in the segregated South, that would've been a perfectly viable business model for many, many very important institutions.
"I think what you've done is you bring up something that really is not an issue," Paul said to Maddow, "nothing I've ever spoken about or have any indication that I'm interested in any legislation concerning." That's actually wrong: Paul isn't likely to get the chance to modify Title IX of the Civil Rights Act anytime soon. But he will have to vote on quite a bit of legislation that uses the commerce clause to regulate private businesses. And that's why this matters.
Paul's defense of himself is that his take on the Civil Rights Act has nothing to do with race and so he is not a racist. But by the same token, the fact that Paul's view on the Civil Rights Act is so dominated by his libertarian ideology that he cannot even admit race and segregation into the calculus is exactly why this is relevant to Paul's candidacy, why it's an issue and why it's among the best evidence we have in understanding how he'll vote on legislation that comes before him. If this isn't about race, then it is about all questions relating to federal regulation of private enterprise. As a senator, Paul will be faced with that question frequently. And his views on it are clearly very, very far from the mainstream.
