The Tea Party libertarian will likely prove a more effective figurehead than senator.
For all the furor the Tea Party movement generated this year, when it came to the mightiest deliberative body in human history, the U.S. Senate, the Tea Party won only one real prize: Rand Paul's election as Kentucky’s junior senator. On the surface he's a Republican, but Paul frames himself as a representative of a supposedly trans-partisan Tea Party, burning with an urge to cut spending and curb debt that he admits his GOP comrades have not shown.
In terms of passing laws or shifting the Senate in his direction, Paul is not going to get much done by trying to operate as a one-man Tea Party in a minority party. Though he may become a filibuster machine, which given his outlier status means the Senate will have lots of cloture votes to shut him up. (He is not likely to succeed in using the filibuster to cap the debt limit and thereby destroy the entire world economy, as has been wildly speculated in some quarters.)
While those frightened by Paul see in him the power and will to wreck the planet, his fans are unduly thrilled just to hear a senator-elect talking about raising the retirement age and means testing for Social Security; cutting federal employment and pay; plotting a two-year path to a balanced budget; pushing term limits and a balanced budget constitutional amendment; insisting that bills should point to their constitutional justification and that senators should have read them before signing on; and even, to the surprise of some who found him avoiding his father’s non-interventionism on the campaign trail, talking up military cuts and questioning the value of our Afghanistan mission.
Read more at Reason
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