Mother Jones
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
This past weekend—days after Mother Jones revealed video of Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) claiming that Dick Cheney exploited 9/11 to start the Iraq War to boost profits for Halliburton, the military contractor where Cheney had been CEO—Paul claimed in interviews with ABC News and Business Insider that he had never questioned Cheney’s motives. He insisted he had merely noted that Cheney’s Halliburton ties had posed the “chance for a conflict of interest.” Paul was spinning—not acknowledging the actual comments. But when Paul was running for the US Senate in 2009 and 2010 as a tea party outsider who would take on Washington’s special-interest lobbyists, he repeatedly cited the Cheney-connected Halliburton as an example of what was wrong in the nation’s capital. In a videotaped talk on national-security policy, for example, Paul complained, “We give billion-dollar contracts to Halliburton, they turn around and spend millions on lobbyists to ask for more money from government. It’s an endless cycle of special-interest lobbyists.” At one campaign stop after another, Paul bashed Halliburton, and he boasted that he had a bold and imaginative plan for limiting the influence of big-money lobbyists and donors who funnel cash into the campaign coffers of candidates to win access and favors. But several years into his first term, Paul has yet to introduce this proposal—or say much, if anything, about it. In fact, he has been accepting contributions from the lobbyists he once so passionately decried.
On March 2, 2010, Paul appeared on CNN, and host Rick Sanchez asked him what he would do about the “unbelievable amounts of money that are being paid from certain industries into the campaign coffers of certain politicians…and how are you going to deal with that, if you get elected?” Without pausing, Paul confidently replied:
I think that I have a cure for it actually that will pass constitutional muster. What I would do is, on every federal contract, I would have a clause, and it says, if you accept this clause you voluntarily give up the right to lobby, you voluntarily give up the right to give PAC contributions. And I would have the top 20 officers sign it also individually, voluntarily give up their right to give political contributions…I’m talking about people who do business with the federal government. For example, we have big business that get billion-dollar no-bid contracts with the government. They take their first million dollars, and they buy a lobbyist. The lobbyist goes then and asks for more money. It’s a vicious cycle. So I would say if you want to do business with the federal government, what I would say is let’s have a clause in the contract, and it’s a voluntary clause, you don’t have to do business with the government, but if you do, then you give up certain things.
Paul’s critique was reminiscent of the position Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) advocated when he was a campaign finance reform firebrand years ago. McCain denounced the “iron triangle” of lobbyists, campaign contributions, and legislation. Paul, who has often slammed McCain for passing a campaign finance law imposing limits on what outside groups can do to affect federal elections, had devised his own way to break up this unseemly triangle.
More here:
How Rand Paul Bailed on His Bold Plan to Reform Big-Money Politics in Washington
