Payback Is Coming to Rand Paul

In a chamber of dark tailored suits, the rebel wore khakis, a cherry red tie to match his campaign color and an occasional smirk. He seized the U.S. Senate with magic words of parliamentary procedure and forced change upon the world’s most powerful intelligence agency. “I challenge the ruling of the chair,” Kentucky Senator Rand Paul said. “I request a live quorum call.” Then, simply: “I object.”

With that, the clock ran out on key parts of the USA Patriot Act, the legal anchor of the nation’s Sept. 11 response. The once secret National Security Agency telephone-record vacuum made famous by Edward Snowden went silent, and a simmering debate over the identity of the GOP burst again into view. “This is what we fought the revolution over,” Paul thundered, with a warning to his party: “80% of those under 40 say we have gone too far.”

It looked more like a Hollywood remake than the real thing: the Senator standing alone, speaking of tyranny and duplicity. But that is the drama baked into this scrambled 2016 field. A Republican who rose to power suggesting that Vice President Dick Cheney pushed the Iraq War to profit Halliburton now polls among the top three GOP candidates in Iowa and New Hampshire. “Defeat the Washington machine,” runs his campaign slogan, and he doesn’t just mean the federal bureaucracy. “ISIS is all over Libya,” Paul said recently about the Islamic radicals on the march, “because these same hawks in my party loved Hillary Clinton’s war in Libya.”

His political thesis is generational, the vision of a son hoping to fulfill the destiny of his father Ron, a three-time presidential candidate. The old guard, Rand reasons, will be driven out of power one $5 fundraising tweet at a time, along with its vision of an America that can police the world and collect data on its citizens. “This is a Bush-era generation of Republicans who are on their last legs,” explains Representative Justin Amash, a Michigan Republican who shares the vision. “They are upset with this new generation of Republicans who are more in touch with the people.”

But if there is one thing to know about national-security hawks, it is that they don’t shy from a fight. Out in Wyoming, Cheney, now 74, has planned a September assault on Paul as an “isolationist,” which he previewed from a high-country rodeo for the Wall Street Journal. After a brief truce, former Republican nominee John McCain denounced Paul as “the worst candidate that we could put forward.” And faceless front groups, working with conservative pundits, lay in wait, ready and willing to launch attacks, like the $1 million television buy that greeted Paul’s entry into the race, accusing him of partnership with President Obama for supporting negotiations with Iran.

Then there are the other Republicans in the race, not one of whom spoke up to defend Paul’s stand on the Senate floor. They, too, read the polls but focus instead on those who currently claim to be GOP-primary voters, a group that now counts national security and terrorism as the top issue of 2016. “The best test of a political marketplace is where people go,” taunts South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, a boots-on-the-ground hawk who launched his own campaign on June 1. “And people are tripping over each other to try to kick Rand Paul.”

But Paul has already won this round. With the spying authorities expired, majority leader Mitch McConnell rushed a compromise to the floor, which he warned would be “a resounding victory for those who plotted against our homeland.” By a vote of 67 to 32, the government’s secret database of American phone records ended in favor of a new system that forces phone companies to gather and store the information, which is accessible to court order by specific request.

Unsatisfied with this win, Paul voted “Nay.” It was a rebel’s cry, a sign that the fight will go on.