Ron Paul on Government Reform Republican Representative (TX-14); previously Libertarian for President

Sub-sections under Government Reform:
• Voting+Sponsorships
• Other issues under Government Reform

If Congress doesn't earmark, the Executive Branch decides

PAUL: Earmarking is designating how the money's spent. If the Congress doesn't say the way the money should be spent, it goes to the executive branch, and that's the bad part. You don't want to give more power to the executive branch. Even if I'm president, I don't want more power over that funding. That should be with the people and with the Congress. But the reason we get into trouble with earmarking is the irresponsibility of Congress. Take your highway funds. We're supposed to pay a user fee; we should get our fair share back. But what do they do? They take the highway funds and they spend this money overseas. And then when the highways need building, then you have to go and fight the political system and maneuver and try to get some of your money back. If you say you're against earmarking, the answer is vote against the bill. That is what I do.

Preach the gospel of liberty

PAUL: I would continue to do what I'm doing now, preaching the gospel of liberty. I think that the most important ingredients in this country that made us great was our founders understood what liberty meant, and that is what we need. We have deserted that. We have drifted away. It involves our right to our life, right to our liberty. We ought to be able to keep the fruits of our labor. We ought to understand property rights. We ought to understand contract rights. We ought to understand what sound money is all about, and we ought to understand what national defense means. That means defending this country. That is the bully pulpit we need. We need to defend liberty.

All spending should be designated by earmarks

PAUL: I call it being a constitutionalist, because I believe we should earmark, or designate, every penny. You designate weapons systems. You designate money to go to spend $1 billion on an embassy in Iraq. That's an earmark, too. I say the Congress has more responsibility.

Veto every single bill that violates the 10th amendment

PAUL: Well obviously, it would take more than one individual, but the responsibility of the president would be to veto every single bill that violates the 10th amendment. That would be the solution.

Q: Anything else?

PAUL: Well, government is too big in Washington. It's run away. If we want government, it is proper to do it at the local level. But there's no authority in the constitution to do so much what we're doing. There's no authority for [the federal government] to run our schools, no authority to control our economy, and no authority to control us as individuals on what we do with our personal lives!

Some Executive Orders are legal; but power has been abused

PAUL: The executive orders have been grossly abused by all administrations for a lot of years. Some executive orders are legal. When the president executes proper function like moving troops and other things, yes, it's done with an executive order. But the executive order should never be used to legislate. That is what is so bad. I have made a promise that as president I would never use the executive order to legislate.

I believe in market regulation, but not federal regulation

A: In theory, if you understood the free market in a free society, you don't need government to do that. We live in a society where we have been adapted to this, and you can't just drop it all at once, but you can transition away from it. On regulations, no, I don't believe in any of these federal regulations, but that doesn't mean I don't believe in regulations. The regulation of the marketplace takes care of it. So the marke would dictate it. You can't commit fraud. If you need detailed regulations, you can do it at the state level. But the federal government is not authorized to nitpick every little transaction. The way they use the interstate commerce clause is outrageous.

Everything government does is a mandate

PAUL: Absolutely. And it would help the poor, the people who need a job. The minimum wage is a mandate. We're against mandates, so why should we have it? No, it would be very beneficial. But mandates, that's what the whole society is about. That's what we do all the time. That's what government does: mandate, mandate, mandate. And we talk so much about the ObamaCare mandate, which is very important, but what about Medicare? Isn't that a mandate? Everything we do is a mandate. So this is why you have to look at this at the cause of liberty. We don't need the government running our lives.

Don't use Executive Orders for controversial laws

PAUL: Forcing 12-year-old girls to take an inoculation to prevent STDs is not good medicine. It's not good social policy. But one of the worst parts about that was the way it was done. You know, the governorship in Texas traditionally is supposed to be a weak governorship. I didn't even know they could pass laws by writing an executive order. He did it with an executive order, passed it. The state was furious, and the legislature, overwhelmingly, 90%, repealed this. But I think it's the way it was passed, which was so bad. I think it's a bad piece of legislation. But I don't like the idea of executive orders. I, as president, will not use the executive order to write laws.

FEMA just conditioned people to build where they shouldn't

PAUL: Well, what happened before 1979? We didn't have FEMA. FEMA just conditioned people to build where they shouldn't be building. We lose the market effect of that. But, yeah, my position is, we should have never had it. There's a much better way of doing it. I mean, this whole idea that the federal government can deal with weather and anything in the world, just got to throw a government there? FEMA's broke. They're $20 billion in debt. But I'm not for saying tomorrow close it down. A lot of people pay the insurance. I work real hard to make it work, and I did that in my district, too. But I'll tell you how we should do it. We're spending $20 billion a year for air conditioning in Afghanistan and Iraq. Cut that $20 billion out, bring in--take $10 off the debt, and put $10 into FEMA or whoever else needs it.

Government investment in ANY business is malinvestment

PAUL: There shouldn't be any government assistance to private enterprise. It's not morally correct; it's illegal; it's bad economics. It's not part of the constitution. If you allow an economy to thrive, they'll decide how R&D works or where they invest their monies. But when the politicians get in and direct things, you get malinvestment. They do dumb things. They might build too many houses. And they might not direct their research to the right places. So no, it's a fallacy to think that government and politicians and bureaucrats are smart enough to manage the economy, so it shouldn't happen.

CAIN: The government should not be selecting winners and losers. The free market will figure it out.

Enough bipartisanship; gridlock can be the friend of liberty

Tax-funded elections are worse than campaign finance reform

People shouldn't be able to vote to take away others' rights

Government "insurance" is really just a transfer payment

I vote for term limits, but they won't solve anything

Paper money makes Congress believe it has no spending limit

What the Fed and paper money have done for Congress is lead legislators to believe that there are no limits on what they can spend, on what they can propose, and what they can accomplish. They really do behave like college student on spring break who are using their parents' credit card with no limit. But they would hit the roof is the card were ever declined.

The point is, unless one has a strong love of liberty, ignorance regarding money is not something that most members of Congress regret. This ignorance is what allows conservatives and liberals alike to spend, borrow, tax, and inflate to finance their various programs, both foreign and domestic.

Introduced Federal Reserve Transparency Act with Sen.Sanders

He may well be protected by the law, but he is in defiance of the Constitution. The courts, under today's circumstances, will never rule that the Federal Reserve Bank chairman must reveal the information that the Congress or the people seek.

One thing I have noticed in studying the issue is that the more power the Fed has gained, the greater the secrecy they demand. Transparency is currently a hot issue in Congress because the people have awoken and have sent a message. This is not a conservative or liberal issue; it's not a Republican or Democratic issue. It is pervasive, across the political spectrum.

I introduced a Federal Reserve audit bill the Federal Reserve Transparency Act, HR 1207, which Bernie Sanders introduced in the Senate.

The “living Constitution” is the death of democracy

Those who would give us a ‘living’ constitution are actually giving us a dead constitution, since such a thing is completely unable to protect us against encroachments of government power.

Constitution defines much smaller government

Somewhere along the way though, we have drifted away from the constitution, and we as conservatives, especially conservatives running the Republican party, we have drifted a long way from the positions that we used to hold about limited government. We’re going in the wrong direction, and if we continue to do what we are doing, we’re going to have a financial crisis, because you can’t continue to spend too much.

Received the most campaign contributions from the military

Dismantle agencies that have no Constitutional role

A: OK, you may have picked that up 20 or 30 years ago, it’s not part of my platform. As a matter of fact, I’m the only one that really has an interim program. Technically, a lot of those functions aren’t constitutional. But the point is I’m not against the FBI investigation in doing a proper role, but I’m against the FBI spying on people like Martin Luther King. I’m against the CIA fighting secret wars and overthrowing governments.

Q: Would you abolish them?

A: I would not abolish all their functions. But let’s go with the CIA. They’re involved in torture. I would abolish that, yes. But I wouldn’t abolish their requirement to accumulate intelligence for national defense purposes. That’s quite different.

Supports compulsory term limits, not voluntary for himself

A: But I never ran on voluntary term limits. There’s a big difference. I didn’t sign a pledge for a voluntary term limit. Matter of fact, some of the best people that I worked with, who were the most principled, came in on voluntary term limits. Some of them broke their promises, and some didn’t, and they were very good people. So some of the good people left. I didn’t run on that. I support term limits. We had 16 votes on term limits, and I voted yes for them. But voluntary term limits is a lot different than compulsory term limits.

Q: But if you believe in the philosophy of term limits, why wouldn’t you voluntarily [limit your own term]?

A: Philosophy is the solution. What the role of government ought to be, so if you have a turnover and the same people come in and they believe in big government, nothing good is going to come of it.

DC voting representation should be determined by Amendment

A: It’s very clear, under the Constitution, that we couldn’t give the vote to the residents of DC without an amendment to the Constitution. And it should be pursued in that manner.

No federal voter ID card; but state ID cards ok

A: I think the states have the prerogative & obligation to identify the voters and they should. But the reason I get worried about when we start talking about it nationally is, you know, they might want to use the Real ID. They might want to think it’s a good excuse to have a national ID card to vote, and I am positively opposed to any move toward the national ID card.

Constitution was written to restrain the federal government

A free country is designed for individuals to deal with a subject of virtue and excellence. Once we defer to the government to get involved in worrying about our virtue and our excellence and perfect, fair economies, it is done at the sacrifice of liberty. If we do that and we sacrifice that liberty and the job of virtue and excellence is taken over by the government, you can only do that through tyranny.

We are drifting rather rapidly into a totalitarian state

And I would like to reiterate the true doctrine of war written by Christianity, the doctrine of just war, is that you do it only under certain circumstances. You don’t do it for UN resolutions. You don’t do it for weapons that don’t exist. You need to do it with a moral justification. If we would have declared a war, we wouldn’t be debating the war now. It would be over, and we’d all be a lot better off, and we would have 5,000 Americans still alive, and 30,000 uninjured!

Disallow lawsuits that stop public officials invoking God

• HUCKABEE: Yes.
• TANCREDO: Yes.
• COX: Yes.
• BROWNBACK: Yes.
• PAUL: Yes.
• HUNTER: Yes.
• KEYES: Yes.

End government secrecy; restore openness of information

A: I would restore openness to government. I do not think in this country we should have secrecy of government. The purpose of government is to provide privacy for the people. I would never use executive privilege to deny information to the Congress, with the full realization that you protect security information, but in the very general sense, we should be very, very open. We want a transparent government. Currently I believe we could improve on that.

With neocon philosophy, Cheney is more powerful than Bush

A: I certainly wouldn’t support an amendment to change the role of the vice president. But there’s no way to know exactly what goes on, but if you take perceptions from Washington, most people there behind the scenes think the vice president is more powerful than the president. Philosophically, I think this is the case. It’s obvious that he represents a neoconservative viewpoint. And my objection is that that has been the rejection of the Republican Party platform and traditional conservatism. And I think this is where we have gone astray. We have drifted from our fundamental premises and the conservative values that this party used to get.

Signing statements erode constitutional balance

• First, these signing statements tend to move authority from the legislative branch to the executive, thus upsetting our delicate system of checks and balances.
• Next, these statements grant the President power not given by the Constitution, allowing him to usurp powers of the judicial branch.
• Finally, the idea of agencies refusing to enforce the law as enacted sets precedent for the type of run away administrative actions our constitution was expressly enacted in order to avoid.

Conservatives support big government war policies

Close departments of Energy, Education & Homeland Security

THOMPSON: There are several programs that need to be cut in Washington, several of those in my former department. I would first make every agency come in with a budget at 95% of last year’s budget and one at 100%. And you will be able to use that exercise in order to reduce budgets all across the line.

Q: I didn’t hear three programs. Can you tell me one?

THOMPSON: The first one I would eliminate is a program in the Department of Health and Human Services in CDC that deals with the stockpile. The stockpile does a great job, but there are some inefficiencies there.

Q: [To Paul] Can you do better than that?

PAUL: I’d start with the departments--the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, Department of Homeland Security. There’s a lot of things that we can cut, but we can’t cut anything until we change our philosophy about what government should do.

Judges have become legislators by de-emphasizing juries

Our government routinely lies to us

Our government routinely lies to us. The luxuries of the current generation are financed by the sweat and blood of the next. Yet flowery slogans are used to describe the wonderful prosperity we enjoy, with few realizing the seriousness of the indebtness incurred in the process. In the midst of a market glut, more and more people each year get pushed into the poverty class.

Federal abuses today worse than King’s in 1776 revolution

Today’s oppression is entrenched and a great threat, but it is nevertheless tolerated by most Americans. The numbers of those who are resentful of government’s abuse are growing, and this is a positive sign.

Today’s simmering economic, social and political problems will eventually boil over. Big government advocates will spare no abuse, no resources, not cost, no tricks, no force in order to maintain the status quo of state power.

Statism itself will be at stake and those in power will feel threatened. They will easily win unless the determination of those who love freedom is superior to the desires of those in charge to cling to their power.

Politicians dislike gold standard--it disallows dishonesty

Because gold is honest money, it is disliked by dishonest men. Politicians have learned how to buy votes with the people's money. They promise to vote for all sorts of programs, if elected, and they expect to pay for those programs through deficits and through the creation of money out of thin air, not higher taxes. Under a gold standard, such irresponsibility would immediately result in high interest rates and subsequent unemployment. But through the magic of the Federal Reserve, these effects can be postponed for awhile, allowing the politicians sufficient time to blame everyone else for the economic problems they have caused

Spending without taxation causes inflation

Everyone in Congress talks about a balanced budget, but few consistently vote for one. Each Member always hopes that it will be the other man’s projects that will be cut, not his own. [Each Member] knows that the money for pork-barrel spending bills would either have to be taxed or printed up.

Liberals we expect to be big spenders, but it’s disheartening to see conservatives who should know better voting for business and farm subsidies. Without a far-reaching change of attitude, the budget won’t be balanced, the printing press will continue to run, the dollar will be further debased, and prices--as a consequence--will continue to rise relentlessly.

Put 65 projects into 2006 bills, worth $4B to his district

A: You got it completely wrong. I’ve never voted for an earmark in my life.

Q: No, but you put them in the bill.

A: I put it in because I represent people who are asking for some of their money back.

Q: If you put it in the bill, and then you know it’s going to pass Congress and so you don’t refuse the money.

A: Well, no, of course not. It’s like taking a tax credit. I’m against the taxes but I take all my tax credits. I want to get the money back for the people.

Q: If you were true to your philosophy, you would say no pork spending in my district.

A: No, no, that’s not it. They steal our money, that’s like saying that people shouldn’t take Social Security money. I’m trying to save the system, make the system work

No on all earmarks, even those he proposes for his district

A: How many of them ever got passed? But the whole point is, we have a right [to our money back from taxes].

Q: They pass. You vote against them, but you take the money.

A: They take our money from us, and the Congress has the authority to appropriate, not the executive branch. And I’m saying that I represent my people. They have a request, it’s like taking a tax credit. The whole process is corrupt so that I vote against everything. I vote against it, so I don’t endorse the system.

Q: But when it passes overwhelmingly, you take the money back home.

A: I don’t take it. That’s the system.

Q: Well, when you stop taking earmarks or putting earmarks in the spending bills, then I think you’ll be consistent.

A: I’m trying to change that system. To turn it around and say I’m supporting this system, I find it rather ironic and entertaining.

Voted NO on Senate pay raise.

Makes appropriations to the Senate for FY2010 for:
1. expense allowances;
2. representation allowances for the Majority and Minority Leaders;
3. salaries of specified officers, employees, and committees (including the Committee on Appropriations);
4. agency contributions for employee benefits;
5. inquiries and investigations;
6. the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control;
7. the Offices of the Secretary and of the Sergeant at Arms and Doorkeeper of the Senate;
8. miscellaneous items;
9. the Senators' Official Personnel and Office Expense Account; and
10. official mail costs.

Proponent's argument to vote Yes:Rep. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ (D, FL-20): We, as Members of Congress, have responsibility not just for the institution, but for the staff that work for this institution, and to preserve the facilities that help support this institution. We have endeavored to do that responsibly, and I believe we have accomplished that goal.

Opponent's argument to vote No:Rep. SCALISE (R, LA-1): It's a sad day when someone attempts to cut spending in a bill that grows government by the size of 7%, and it's not allowed to be debated on this House floor. Some of their Members actually used the term "nonsense" and "foolishness" when describing our amendments to cut spending; they call that a delaying tactic. Well, I think Americans all across this country want more of those types of delaying tactics to slow down this runaway train of massive Federal spending. Every dollar we spend from today all the way through the end of this year is borrowed money. We don't have that money. We need to control what we're spending.

Voted NO on requiring lobbyist disclosure of bundled donations.

1. file a quarterly report with Congress; and
2. notify the recipient.

Proponents support voting YES because:

This measure will more effectively regulate, but does not ban, the practice of registered lobbyists bundling together large numbers of campaign contributions. This is a practice that has already taken root in Presidential campaigns. "Bundling" contributions which the lobbyist physically receives and forwards to the candidate, or which are credited to the lobbyist through a specific tracking system put in place by the candidate. This bill requires quarterly reporting on bundled contributions.

We ultimately need to move to assist the public financing of campaigns, as soon as we can. But until we do, the legislation today represents an extremely important step forward.

Opponents support voting NO because:

This legislation does not require that bundled contributions to political action committees, often referred to as PACs, be disclosed. Why are PACs omitted from the disclosure requirements in this legislation?

If we are requiring the disclosure of bundled contributions to political party committees, those same disclosure rules should also apply to contributions to PACs. Party committees represent all members of that party affiliation. PACs, on the other hand, represent more narrow, special interests. Why should the former be exposed to more sunshine, but not the latter?

The fact that PACs give more money to Democrats is not the only answer. Time and again the majority party picks favorites, when what the American people want is more honesty and more accountability.

Voted NO on granting Washington DC an Electoral vote & vote in Congress.

Proponents support voting YES because:

This bill corrects a 200-year-old oversight by restoring to the citizens of the District of Columbia the right to elect a Member of the House of Representatives who has the same voting rights as all other Members.

Residents of D.C. serve in the military. They pay Federal taxes each year. Yet they are denied the basic right of full representation in the House of Representatives.

The District of Columbia was created to prevent any State from unduly influencing the operations of the Federal Government. However, there is simply no evidence that the Framers of the Constitution thought it was necessary to keep D.C. residents from being represented in the House by a voting Member.

Opponents support voting NO because:

The proponents of this bill in 1978 believed that the way to allow D.C. representation was to ratify a constitutional amendment. The Founders of the country had the debate at that time: Should we give D.C. a Representative? They said no. So if you want to fix it, you do it by making a constitutional amendment.

Alternatively, we simply could have solved the D.C. representation problem by retroceding, by giving back part of D.C. to Maryland. There is precedent for this. In 1846, Congress took that perfectly legal step of returning present-day Arlington to the State of Virginia.

Voted YES on protecting whistleblowers from employer recrimination.

Proponents support voting YES because:

This bill would strengthen one of our most important weapons against waste, fraud and abuse, and that is Federal whistleblower protections. Federal employees are on the inside and offer accountability. They can see where there is waste going on or if there is corruption going on.

One of the most important provisions protects national security whistleblowers. There are a lot of Federal officials who knew the intelligence on Iraq was wrong. But none of these officials could come forward. If they did, they could have been stripped of their security clearances, or they could have been fired. Nobody blew the whistle on the phony intelligence that got us into the Iraq war.

Opponents support voting NO because:

It is important that personnel within the intelligence community have appropriate opportunities to bring matters to Congress so long as the mechanisms to do so safeguard highly sensitive classified information and programs. The bill before us suffers from a number of problems:

1. The bill would conflict with the provisions of the existing Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act of 1998, which protecting sensitive national security information from unauthorized disclosure to persons not entitled to receive it.
2. The bill violates the rules of the House by encouraging intelligence community personnel to report highly sensitive intelligence matters to committees other than the Intelligence Committees. The real issue is one of protecting highly classified intelligence programs and ensuring that any oversight is conducted by Members with the appropriate experiences, expertise, and clearances.
3. This bill would make every claim of a self-described whistleblower, whether meritorious or not, subject to extended and protracted litigation.

Voted YES on requiring photo ID for voting in federal elections.

Proponents support voting YES because:

The election system is the bedrock that our Republic is built on and its security and oversight is of paramount concern. Only US citizens have the right to vote in Federal elections, but our current system does not give State election officials the tools they need to ensure that this requirement is being met.

This bill is designed to increase participation by ensuring that each legitimate vote will be counted and not be diluted by fraud. There are many elections in this country every cycle that are decided by just a handful of votes. How can we be certain that these elections, without measures to certify the identity of voters, are not being decided by fraudulent votes?

Opponents support voting NO because:

There is something we can all agree on: only Americans get to vote, and they only get to vote once. But what we are talking about in this bill is disenfranchising many of those Americans. It is already a felony for a non-American to vote. We had hearings and what we found out was that the issue of illegal aliens voting basically does not occur.

The impact of this will disproportionately affect poor people and African Americans, because many are too poor to have a car and they do not have a license. We have no evidence there is a problem. We have ample evidence that this will disenfranchise many Americans. This is the measure to disenfranchise African Americans, Native Americans. It is wrong and we will not stand for it.

Voted NO on restricting independent grassroots political committees.