In a new interview, Rand Paul is back to suggesting he might not vote for Mitch McConnell to lead the Republicans in the Senate if he wins a seat there. In a new twist, he’s also promising to create a sort of Senate Justice League consisting of Sharron Angle, Tom Coburn, Utah’s GOP Senate nominee Mike Lee and Jim DeMint.
“I think I will be part of a nucleus with Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn, who are unafraid to stand up,” Paul told National Review recently. “If we get another loud voice in there, like Mike Lee from Utah or Sharron Angle from Nevada, there will be a new nucleus.”
What would this new “nucleus” bring to the Senate?
“Term limits, a balanced-budget amendment, having bills point to where they are enumerated in the Constitution,” Paul says in the interview. “Those issues resonate with the tea party.”
As for McConnell, it seems Paul’s feelings about him have returned to their pre-primary ambivalence. Back in May, Paul solidified his anti-establishment cred by saying in a primary debate that he might not vote for McConnell if he made it to the Senate.
Shortly after the primary, when Paul was making a big show of making nice with the establishment that was largely horrified by his first week on the campaign trail as the nominee, Paul’s campaign manager said all that talk of Paul voting against McConnell was, you know, bunk.
“It’s almost impossible to see a situation where Rand wouldn’t vote for Mitch McConnell,” Benton told the AP in June.
That period of the Paul campaign is apparently over. Asked by National Review if he’d vote for McConnell to lead the Senate GOP if he makes it to Washington in the fall, Paul was back to his pre-primary hedging.
“Maybe,” he told the magazine.
There’s more to be found in the new interview, including talk of Paul’s sorta-kinda libertarianism (“He tells us that he sees himself as a ‘constitutional conservative'”) and the reason why he doesn’t talk about what he really believes in the wake of all that 1964 Civil Rights Act stuff (“‘I have a target on me,’ Paul laughs. ‘If you take my shirt off, you can see the target on my back.'”). Read it here.
