I generally think Rand Paul is an asshat, but based on what I’m reading, I’m siding with him on this one. I reject claims made by the administration with regard to drones and drone strikes in US territory.
I generally think Rand Paul is an asshat, but based on what I’m reading, I’m siding with him on this one. I reject claims made by the administration with regard to drones and drone strikes in US territory.
#1 by Larry Bergan on March 6, 2013 - 9:03 pm
Republicans are actually doing a filibuster. What changed?
Maybe they’re worried Obama is planning on droning the tea caucus.
Actually, Rand wasn’t doing that bad a job though.
#2 by Richard Warnick on March 7, 2013 - 7:14 am
At the very least, Senator Paul made the case for a “talking filibuster” that actually brings an issue to public attention. Most Americans didn’t know that our Attorney General asserted that the government could legally attack its own citizens with drones inside the United States.
#3 by Shane Smith on March 7, 2013 - 8:28 am
The downside is that while he was speaking we found out that he is even more clueless than we thought…
“Lochner v. New York is widely viewed as one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in American history. It is taught in law schools, alongside decisions upholding segregation and permitting Japanese detention camps, in order to instruct budding lawyers on how judges should not behave. Even Robert Bork, the failed, right-wing Supreme Court nominee who claimed women “aren’t discriminated against anymore”, called Lochner an “abomination” that “lives in the law as the symbol, indeed the quintessence of judicial usurpation of power.”
Lochner fabricated a so-called right to contract in order to strike down a New York law preventing bakery owners from overworking bakers, but its rationale has implications for any law intended to shield workers from exploitation. In essence, Lochner established that any law that limits any contract between an employer and an employee is constitutionally suspect. If desperation forces someone to agree to work 18 hours a day, seven days a week, for a dollar a day in a factory filled with toxic air, then courts must treat that law with heavy skepticism. Not every workplace law was struck down during the so-called Lochner Era — the justices of that era sometimes valued sexism more than they valued exploiting workers, for example — but Lochner placed any law benefiting workers on constitutionally weak footing. Needless to say, the “right to contract” it invented appears nowhere in the Constitution.
Nevertheless, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) took several minutes out of his lengthy talking filibuster yesterday to praise this “abomination” of a decision on the Senate floor:
You get to the Lochner case. The Lochner case is in 1905. The majority rules 5-4 that the right to make a contract is part of your due process. Someone cannot deprive you of determining how long your working hours are without due process. So President Obama’s a big opponent to this, but I would ask him — among the other things I’m asking him today — to rethink the Lochner case. . . . I think it’s a wonderful decision.”