Rand Paul was on Freedom Watch with Judge Andrew Napolitano with a campaign update, including the story behind James Dobson’s switch, the endorsement this morning from Jim DeMint, and the request the Paul campaign has made that Trey Greyson recuse himself from presiding over the certification of the vote in their Senate primary:
H/T: Cubachi
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), via the Senate Conservatives Fund, has endorsed Rand Paul in the Republican primary for United States Senate in Kentucky:
“I’m endorsing Rand Paul because he’s a true conservative who will stand up to the Washington establishment,” said Senator DeMint. “Rand has been running on the issues that matter since the beginning of this campaign. He’s a strong advocate for balanced budgets, he wants to end the culture of earmarks, he supports term limits, and he’s 100% pro-life. Rand is exactly the kind of leader Americans are looking for right now. He’s not a career politician and he’s got the guts to stand up to the massive spending, bailouts, and debt that are being forced on us in Washington.
[…]
“We’re trying to lead our party back to the principles that made our country great,” said Senator DeMint,” and back to where the majority of Americans want us to be. Americans are looking for leaders who will honor their oath of office by fighting to ‘protect and defend’ the Constitution. They’re looking for leaders like Rand Paul in Kentucky, and I’m proud to endorse him.”
DeMint, one of my heroes, was not going to get involved in the race, but after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell got involved in the race yesterday by endorsing Trey Grayson, I guess he felt that he had to jump in.
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) has joined Sen. Bernie Sanders in placing a hold on Ben Bernanke’s confirmation to a second term as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. DeMint says that his hold will remain in place until S. 604, the Senate version of the “Audit the Fed” legislation, has passed.
From DeMint’s press release:
Congressional term limits have been a dead letter since shortly after the Republican “revolution” of 1994, but Senator Jim DeMint is taking up the mantle:
Sen. Jim DeMint says Washington politicians are like fruit on the vine: the longer they hang around, the more rotten they get.
The South Carolina Republican - hearkening back to the days of the party’s “Contract with America” - on Tuesday offered a fix to the corrupting influence of “permanent politicians,” introducing an amendment to the Constitution that would limit Senate members to three six-year terms and House members to three two-year terms.
“As long as members have the chance to spend their lives in Washington, their interests will always skew toward spending taxpayer dollars to buy off special interests, covering over corruption in the bureaucracy, fundraising, relationship building among lobbyists, and trading favors for pork - in short, amassing their own power,” said Mr. DeMint, who is running for a second term next year.
Senate leaders and longtime Washington watchdogs said Mr. DeMint’s bill had a zero chance of becoming law, mostly because of a general lack of interest and the high hurdles to amending the Constitution.
“It’s a great issue to talk about, but it’s not going to happen,” said Sen. Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the Democratic majority’s second-highest ranking leader.
Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) blames his colleagues from the South, specifically Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), for the GOP’s problems:
The GOP’s biggest problem? “We got too many Jim DeMints (R-S.C.) and Tom Coburns (R-Ok.). It’s the southerners. They get on TV and go ‘errrr, errrrr.’ People hear them and say, ‘These people, they’re southerners. The party’s being taken over by southerners. What they hell they got to do with Ohio?’”
Gee, and here I thought that Republicans that vote to expand government were the problem. Voinovich is gone in 2010 (he’s retiring). Good riddence.
To say that the trillion dollar plus bailout about to be rammed through is wildly unpopular is a gross understatement. What’s surprising is that the conglomerate of critics is not limited to libertarians or fiscal conservatives or even pragmatists, but includes individuals who are quasi-socialists and/or typical Bush Admistration loyalists.
Luigi Zingales, a Professor at the University of Chicago School of Business-
“For somebody like me who believes strongly in the free market system, the most serious risk of the current situation is that the interest of a few financiers will undermine the fundamental workings of the capitalist system. The time has come to save capitalism from the capitalists.”
Nouriel Roubini, an economist at New York University-
President Bush is “asking for a huge amount of power,” - “He’s saying, ‘Trust me, I’m going to do it right if you give me absolute control.’ This is not a monarchy.
Paul Krugman, the Princeton University economist and liberal columnist for The New York Times-
“I hate to say this, but looking at the plan as leaked, I have to say no deal,” he wrote on his blog at 4:46 p.m. Saturday. “Not unless Treasury explains, very clearly, why this is supposed to work, other than through having taxpayers pay premium prices for lousy assets.”
Yves Smith, contributor to the finance blog Naked Capitalism-
“Given that continuing to buy U.S. assets will come under increasingly harsh scrutiny overseas, the U.S. needs to bend over backwards to devise a plan that at least looks credible in terms of directing the funds that come from taxpayers and lenders to their highest and best uses and implementing reforms that will restore active and prudent oversight of financial firms,” - “The administration’s demand for a free pass, even if Congress unwisely goes along, is likely to backfire with our foreign creditors.”
Gregory Mankiw, former chairman of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers-
“Has more money ever been given with fewer restrictions on how it is used? Ever?”
Sen. Richard Shelby (R- AL), ranking Republican on the Banking Committee, called it-
“the mother of all bailouts. I figure it will be at least half a trillion. But if you look at what the Fed has already done [by rescuing insurance giant AIG], and the extension of power to Treasury to deal with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, I believe we’re talking about a trillion dollars. [The Bush Administration] lurching from one crisis to another. They don’t seem to have a superplan to deal with this. … We want to see the plan. This is not a done deal yet. But we know there’s crisis, there’s stress, in the financial markets that we haven’t seen in, say, 70 years.”
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), a member of the Joint Economic Committee-
“What is missing from it and from the recent string of bailouts is a commitment to return to a free enterprise economy. … What we need now is not what could be nearly a trillion dollars in new taxpayer bailouts but pro-growth policies that allow our markets to correct and start growing again.”
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ)-
“I am greatly concerned that the plan gives a single individual the unprecedented power to spend $1 trillion — trillion — dollars without any meaningful accountability. Never before in the history of our nation has so much power and money been concentrated in the hands of one person. This arrangement makes me deeply uncomfortable.”
Rep. Scott Garrett (R-NJ)-
“In the short term, I have great concerns about spending taxpayer money with limited accountability for these actions,” Garrett said. “In the long term, I am very concerned about the inflationary pressures that will arise from this action.”
Michelle Malkin, conservative author and columnist-
“Both parties in Washington are about to screw us over on an unprecedented scale. They are threatening us with fiscal apocalypse if we don’t fork over $700 billion to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and allow him to dole it out to whomever he chooses in whatever amount he chooses — without public input or recourse. They are rushing like mad to cram this Mother of All Bailouts down our throats in the next 72-96 hours. And right there in the text of the proposal is this naked power grab: “Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”
United Liberty
