Federal administrative agencies issued 3,271 new regulations in 2010, or roughly nine regulations per day. Small businesses spend an estimated $10,500 per employee to comply with federal regulations, a considerable burden on the private sector’s ability to create jobs at a time of continued economic struggles.

But who should be accountable for the federal regulations resulting from laws? Congress.

Since the New Deal, every Congress has delegated more of its constitutional lawmaking authority to unelected bureaucrats in administrative agencies through vaguely written laws.

In the past few years, we have seen examples of administrative agencies going beyond their original grants of power to implement policies not approved by Congress. In several cases, such as net neutrality rules and the regulation of carbon emissions, agencies are pursuing regulations after Congress has explicitly rejected the concept.

We believe it is time for Congress to resume its constitutional duty to make the law and then be held accountable for the details. That is why we have introduced the Regulations From the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act.

The REINS Act would require Congress to hold an up-or-down vote on any major regulation, with an annual economic impact of more than $100 million. The president would also have to sign the regulation before it could be enforced on the American people, job creators or state and local governments.

Every major regulation would be voted on within a specified amount of time, forcing Members of Congress to take a stand and be held accountable for major regulations with a significant economic impact.

Congress has a history of taking credit for the benefits of a law but then faulting the bureaucracy for the costs and requirements of the regulations authorized by the law it passed. Congress would no longer be able to avoid responsibility by sending vague laws to the executive branch and blaming it for filling in the unpopular details.
A frequently cited argument against REINS is that it constitutes a legislative veto — and by doing so violates the principles of bicameralism and presentment required by the Constitution. This is incorrect.

The REINS Act satisfies both the bicameralism and presentment requirements of the Constitution. Just as the delegation of authority for major rules is removed by the REINS Act through the normal legislative process, joint resolutions of approval for major rules require bicameral passage and presentment to the president to be implemented. As such, the REINS Act is fully consistent with the Supreme Court’s decision in INS v. Chadha.

Indeed, the very concept underlying the REINS Act was first outlined by then-Judge Stephen Breyer as a constitutional replacement for the legislative veto struck down in Chadha. As Breyer explained, Congress could make new rules ineffective “unless Congress enacts a confirmatory law” within a set time frame.

The REINS Act will also foster greater up-front cooperation between agencies and future Congresses, resulting in better written legislation and regulation. With greater accountability and transparency, regulations will have to reflect the need for sensible standards and take into account the effect regulations have on American families and businesses.

Congress will not be able to delay the regulatory process because the REINS Act requires that every new major regulation receive a vote by the House and the Senate within 70 legislative days of being introduced. The bill also contains provisions that negate the need for a cloture vote, so regulations cannot be filibustered in the Senate.

In an era of high unemployment and out-of-control federal spending, Congress can no longer shirk its responsibility to the American people by allowing the unaccountable growth of the regulatory state. The REINS Act would be a major step forward in returning to a constitutional, responsible legislative and regulatory framework, and we urge our colleagues in both chambers to pass this bill.

The bill’s name as a metaphor for the reins on a horse is fitting. The purpose of reins is not to keep a horse at a standstill. Reins are a tool to ensure the horse knows what is expected of it and is acting according to the intent and will of the rider.

Related posts:

1. Senator Paul Statement on House Passage of REINS Act
2. Senator Rand Paul Introduces REINS Act
3. Senate Republican Jobs Plan Supports REINS Act Passage

By Geoffrey P. Hunt – American Thinker – Source

Rand Paul, freshman US Senator from Kentucky, at a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing last month, summed up in a few choice sentences the Democratic Party progressive agenda:

You’re really anti-choice on every consumer item that you’ve listed here, including light bulbs, refrigerators, toilets — you name it, you can’t go around your house without being told what to buy… You raise the cost of all the items with your rules, all your notions that you know what’s best for me.

A few days ago, in further hearings on more appliance regulations, Sen. Paul continued his assault on the “boot heel of the collective,” drawing from Ayn Rand.

Exhortations about light bulbs and liberty are good for a rally or entertainment for a cable news sound bite, or a late night comedy show. But there’s more going on here.

It’s time for us to insist that there is no basis in the US Constitution for home appliance regulations designed to control the consumption of electricity or water. Any such statutes or regulations fail the Rehnquist Court reading of the Commerce Clause, Article I Sec 8 Clause 3: “Congress shall have the power … to regulate Commerce … among the several States … ” and usurp the Ninth Amendment from the people.

The central issue is how the Commerce Clause, previously distorted and stretched to underwrite any and every conceivable interference in our daily lives, may have finally found its high water mark under the conservative Rehnquist Court. There is considerable scholarship underlining the original context of the Commerce Clause and its application, notably from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Law Professor Randy Barnett in his 2001 Chicago Law Review article “The Original Meaning of the Commerce Clause” writes at the outset:

In United States v Lopez 1, [a Supreme Court opinion where a federal statute, the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990 prohibiting firearms within 1,000 yards of a school, was overturned ]for the first time in sixty years, the Supreme Court of the United States held a statute to be unconstitutional because it exceeded the powers of Congress under the Commerce Clause 2. In his concurring opinion, Justice Thomas offered a critique of contemporary Commerce Clause doctrine–based on the original meaning of the clause–that went well beyond the majority opinion. According to Justice Thomas, “at the time the original Constitution was ratified, ‘commerce’ consisted of selling, buying, and bartering, as well as transporting for these purposes.”3 He also cited the etymology of the word, which literally means “with merchandise.” 4 He then noted that “when Federalists and Anti-Federalists discussed the Commerce Clause during the ratification period, they often used trade (in its selling/bartering sense) and commerce interchangeably.”5 The term “commerce,” according to Justice Thomas, “was used in contradistinction to productive activities such as manufacturing and agriculture.”6

In a Connecticut Law Review article in 1997, law professors David Harlan and Glenn Reynolds, in a prescient overview “Taking Federalism Seriously,” ostensibly about partial birth abortion, examined the inconsistencies in using the Commerce Clause to justify regulating any intrastate local transaction depending on the partisan whims of legislators. Harlan and Reynolds derive their thesis also from United States vs Lopez noting the Court struck down the federal statute, not on 2nd Amendment grounds but on a more sweeping denial of traditional Commerce Clause assertions argued by the government.

Prior to Lopez nearly any product or service transacted locally but made available via interstate transport gave constitutional cover to far reaching federal restrictions and mandates. While the Court in Lopez was mainly preoccupied with federalization of the criminal code, the majority coiled its arguments around the Commerce Clause stem.

Harlan and Reynolds summarize the majority opinion from Chief Justice Rehnquist in Lopez whereby Congress may only regulate “channels of interstate commerce,” “instrumentalities of interstate commerce” (transportation modes), and “activities that substantially affect interstate commerce.”

And as Harlan and Reynolds note, the abrupt and newly found narrow use of the Commerce Clause did not go unnoticed by dissenting Justices Stephen Breyer and John Paul Stevens. Breyer asserted Lopez is inconsistent with prior Supreme Court jurisprudence while Stevens said Lopez is “radical.”

While Harlan and Reynolds are careful not to lend too much significance to Lopez in providing guidance to other Commerce Clause cases, following Lopez there have been two notable Supreme Court cases. United States vs Morrison where parts of the federal statute Violence Against Women Act of 1994 were found to fail the Commerce Clause test formulated in Lopez. And in 2001, Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County (SWANCC) v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers where the majority found the Corps of Engineers did not have authority to regulate activity in waters isolated from interstate navigable waters. And more recently where Judge Roger Vinson of the Federal District of Northern Florida in State of Florida et al vs United States Department of Health and Human Services struck down the individual mandate of ObamaCare, relying on the Commerce Clause guidance from Lopez.

Harlan and Reynolds cut to the heart of the matter in discussing Justice Thomas’s concurrence in Lopez, revealing his own more circumscribed twist than any other conservative on the Court:

While the majority opinion stated that Commerce Clause-based statutes must deal with subjects that “substantially affect” interstate commerce, rather than merely “affect” it, Justice Thomas suggested that the whole “effects” debate was off the point. The power to regulate “Commerce . . . among the several States” means exactly what it says: the power to regulate the interstate buying and selling of goods. “Commerce” means buying and selling things–not manufacturing, and not simply “any form of economic activity.”[FN76] The Constitution did not grant Congress power to regulate activities which merely affect (even in a substantial way) interstate commerce.

So, how does all of this affect light bulbs, refrigerators, washing machines, and low flow toilets?

In the case of electrical appliances, including light bulbs, the goal of most recent regulation has been to reduce consumption of electricity. Since electricity consumption, as a matter of both physics and the economic structure of power generation and distribution, is necessarily a local (i.e. state) matter, any regulation at the federal level would run afoul of the Commerce Clause condition “activities that substantially affect interstate commerce” at least as read by the majority conservative justices in Lopez.

Electrical power consumption is local because no homeowner can buy power outside of local utilities who control local distribution. In some states “retail wheeling” exists where a business can cut a deal from an out-of-state energy provider. But the energy is still distributed via a local regulated utility and the user pays two rates — a base power rate and a distribution rate. Retail wheeling, in any event, is not available to residential customers, as far as I know.

Therefore any regulation on electrical appliances pertaining to energy consumption (read efficiency) can only come from a state, not the feds. In short we don’t consume power from an interstate enterprise. We buy power from a local utility. And how about the homeowner who relies on a propane generator, solar panels, or a wind generator? What’s interstate about that? Thus the feds cannot regulate residential appliances at least as far as electricity usage is concerned.

What about an argument that appliance standards affect interstate commerce by the impact on CO2, other air emissions, or use of fossil fuels from interstate sources? That argument fails the “substantially affects interstate commerce” test because residential appliances, especially light bulbs, are used at the time of day, early morning or evening, at the lowest base demand point, thus cannot affect the operation of power plant loadings locally, let alone across the nation.

In other words, light bulbs can be either energy hogs or energy tightwads and have no impact on power generation costs, emissions, or fuel use. If a homeowner uses fewer kwhs, the power plant must still be in operation. If he or she uses more kwhs then the power plant will just soak up otherwise idle on-line capacity already fired up. Because the operation of household light bulbs has negligible effects on interstate generation or transportation of electrical power, any federal statute regulating electrical devices for the consumption of energy must fail the Rehnquist Court test.

Just because light bulbs themselves are traded via interstate commerce does not justify using the Commerce Clause to regulate light bulbs re energy consumption. Certainly Justice Thomas would vacate the EISA 2007 section on the phase out of inefficient incandescent light bulbs without breaking a sweat or writing more than one paragraph.

How about washing machines and Sen. Paul’s favorite whipping boy, low flow toilets? Since the primary purpose of washing machine regulations is to conserve the use of water and all residential water use is provided via a local water authority or by a private well, the feds can’t possibly assert jurisdiction as long as the Rehnquist Court guidance under Lopez is upheld. Certainly in some western states, water distribution and rights may be conveyed under complex interstate mechanisms. Yes those mechanisms would properly be controlled by Congress under the Commerce Clause, but not individual household water usage.

And just like light bulbs, the use of a single household low flow toilet or water saving washing machine cannot have any affect on the interstate water systems, whether from the flow of water from Lake Superior to the eastern end of Lake Ontario, the Colorado River, the Ohio River system or underground aquifers whose geology may cross under two or more states.

Robert Bork and Daniel Troy in a piece entitled “The Boundaries of the Commerce Clause” have a rather gloomy outlook on whether the Commerce Clause can ever be restored to its original purpose:

There is no possibility, today, of adhering completely to the original constitutional design. Such a daring plan would require overturning the New Deal, the Great Society, and almost all of the vast network of federal legislation and regulation put in place in the last two-thirds of the twentieth century. It appears that the American people would be overwhelmingly against such a change and no court would attempt to force it upon them.

Well ok, let’s not try to boil the ocean. Let’s start with a simple and symbolic case study — light bulbs, refrigerators, washing machines, and yes, Rand Paul’s low flow toilets.

But Rand Paul has tapped into the frustrations of the majority of regular Americans who are affronted by the arrogance of Congress in taking away consumer choices while interfering with every detail in their daily lives. Can Sen. Paul also be a champion for the Constitution that should be the guarantor of what most Americans would like to believe but few have the resources to assert — an enumerated power to be left alone?

Originally from American Thinker.com

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The programs sound innocuous enough: One spends federal money to store cotton bales. Another offers scholars a chance to study Asian-American relations. Two others pay to market U.S. oranges in Asia and clean up abandoned coal mines.

But in Washington’s wonkier circles, these are the federal budget’s equivalent of Jason Voorhees, the hockey-masked movie villain who could take an ax in the skull and come back for the sequel.

They are the Line Items That Won’t Die.

In recent years, leaders in both parties — including, in some cases, presidents from both parties — have singled out these four programs, worth a total of about $337 million, to either be eliminated or lose millions in funding. But they have survived, again and again, thanks to powerful lobbies or high-placed patrons in Congress. Even this year, after Congress cut $38 billion from the budget, they live on.

Now, in the lull before the next budget battle, watchdog groups say these often-criticized programs show the difficulty of the task ahead.

“This is why Ronald Reagan said that a government program is the closest thing to eternal life that we’ve ever seen on Earth,” said Brian Riedl of the conservative Heritage Foundation. “If lawmakers can’t cut programs that cost a few million, how are they going to cut deficits that are going to be in the trillions?”

Among the survivors this year was the East-West Center, a Hono­lulu nonprofit that has long been one of the budget’s great immortals.

The center runs exchange programs for U.S. and Asian journalists and young professionals, conducts research and offers scholarships to study at the University of Hawaii. For 2010, President Obama’s budget proposed reducing its federal funding from $21 million to $12 million, arguing that this would encourage the center to seek other sources for money.

That went nowhere.

The center has a powerful ally in Congress: Sen. Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii), the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Instead of shrinking by millions, the center’s subsidy went up by $2 million.

This year, the Republican-controlled House tried again. In February, it voted to strip $10.7 million, half the center’s budget.

Once again, the center mainly escaped the ax. After the House and Senate worked out a final deal, its budget had fallen by about $2 million — basically losing the money it had picked up a year earlier.

The center now also has a direct tie to Obama, whose half-sister, Maya Soetero-Ng, was hired about a year ago to work as a part-time educator. Her work is paid for by private funds.

An administration official said the White House has not pushed for the center’s budget to be cut this year, saying it is focused on disputes over bigger-ticket items. The White House said Soetero-Ng’s connection had nothing to do with this.

A spokesman for Inouye said only that the senator “has been a strong supporter of the East-West Center since its inception.”

“This is the year we thought it would change. It’s the same-old, same-old in the Senate, financial crisis or not,” said Rep. Edward R. Royce (R-Calif.), who supported the amendment to reduce the center’s funding. “For every dollar we spend on this talk-shop, we borrow another 42 cents.”

Buy American, overseas

At the Agriculture Department, the budget deal spared another untouchable: the Market Access Program.

The program costs about $200 million a year and pays to promote U.S. agricultural products in foreign markets. That could mean holding something as simple as a taste test in the aisles of Asian supermarkets, pitting California pistachios against Iranian ones.

In past years, this was one of the rare things that united Obama and the ultra-conservative Republican Study Committee.

The program’s “economic impact is unclear,” Obama’s 2011 budget said. It recommended a 20 percent cut.

“Taxpayers should not be forced to pick up the tab for this kind of corporate welfare,” said the GOP committee, whose members include 175 of 241 House Republicans. It recommended eliminating the whole thing.

But the program has powerful supporters: the U.S. farm lobby.

“It’s the government’s responsibility to help us counter the heavy subsidization enjoyed by our competitors,” said Michael Wootton, a senior vice president at Sunkist Growers and chairman of a coalition that has lobbied to keep the Market Access Program.

Sunkist, a nonprofit group of citrus growers that took in $1 billion in gross sales in fiscal 2010, got $4 million from the government through the program. Wootton said that advertising helps offset the benefits that foreign growers get from government subsidies and tariffs. “With that brand, and that identity, we’re able to effectively overcome the price differential” with cheaper foreign-produced products, Wootton said.

This year, Rep. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.) proposed a budget amendment that would have cut off the money for the program’s staff.

It never came up for a vote.

Read the rest here

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Garbage in, garbage out.

There were supposed to be a number of important votes coming up in the Senate this week, but news from those august halls suddenly dried up on Thursday. Why? Because Rand Paul backed Harry Reid into a corner and forced him to adjourn the Senate.

Paul (R-KY) did this by simply adding a teeny tiny little amendment to a bill. It was one of those “sense of the Senate” deals, where no binding legislation is involved – it’s just the Senate declaring that it has a strong opinion about something.

What, pray tell, did this devastating amendment contain? As related by Robert Costa at National Review, it “chastises President Obama for his actions in Libya” by quoting the President’s now-infamous remarks on the Constitutional authority for making war from 2007:

“The President does not have the power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”

This is monstrously unfair to President Obama, who had no idea Rand Paul would be paying attention to what he said back in 2007. I mean, Dr. Paul was running an ophthalmology clinic back in 2007. He shouldn’t have been listening to the strong and unambiguous statements of lackluster back-bench Senators who are supposedly Constitutional scholars, holding forth about the limits of presidential power. He should have been spending his time forcing people to pretend they can read the bottom line on eye charts.

The fun part of the story is that Paul’s amendment completely blew the mind of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), who Costa explains “does not want his members to have to weigh in on Obama’s dusty quote about congressional authority, even if the vote is only to table the measure.”

Paul got into a floor argument with Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), who is even dimmer than Harry Reid, and therefore even funnier when he gets his dander up. Explaining why it was perfectly legal for Obama to blast away in Libya without Congressional authorization, Durbin insisted that “circumstances moved so quickly, with human life hanging in the balance, the president made that decisions and now stands with the American people making judgment as to whether it was the proper decision to make.”

What? Did anyone else find anything even vaguely resembling a response to Rand Paul’s criticism (well, actually, the criticism he borrowed from Barack Obama) in that mush?

One of the distinguishing features of the Constitution is that it talks about Americans, and does not grant broad exceptions to its requirements when foreign lives are “hanging in the balance.” It also doesn’t make exceptions for people from certain political parties, dissolve in the face of United Nations edicts, or melt before the passion of government officials who care an awful lot about a particular issue.

Watching liberals tie themselves into knots justifying Obama’s transformation into a cowboy neocon warmonger is almost as entertaining as watching the Senate Majority Leader run away from Rand Paul, who crashed the Senate by asking it to declare which Barack Obama it agreed with.

Original article here: http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=42665

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TRANSCRIPT:
I’m not sure I heard it. Is there anybody here from the Tea Party? Are we going to let Washington co-op the Tea Party?

Will you help me fight for and defend the Constitution?

At the turn of the last century, the chaplain of the U.S. Senate was Edward Hale and they asked him, ‘do you pray for the Senate?’ And he said, ‘well, I look at Senators and I pray for the people.’

When I was elected to the Senate a fellow Senator called me to congratulate me and he said, ‘the first six months, you’ll pinch yourself and say, how did I get here? The next six months, you’ll pinch yourself and say, how the hell did the rest of these guys get here?’

I brought with me today two examples -- gross examples -- of government ineptitude. There’s probably thousands of others, but I brought these two I learned about recently from Senator Collins. It’s not that government is inherently stupid, although that’s a debatable question, but I have two examples that may make you wonder whether it is an inherent trait of government. The Energy Department has an EnergyStar program. You’ve seen the stickers for energy efficiency? Well, Senator Collins got wind of this and she said, you know what? I think maybe they’ll approve anything. She had the investigator general send things over. This is an air freshener. I’m not kidding. I’m not making this up. This is the actual air freshener that was sent over to the Energy Department, and it got a sticker. Okay? Approved. We also have -- this is a near facsimile. This is actually the smaller version. It’s much larger than this. A gasoline powered alarm clock. It’s going to save electricity.

Early on in my campaign I stopped by a book publisher in Shepherdsville, Ky. It’s near Louisville. This book publisher had published Barry Goldwater’s “The Conscience of a Conservative,” the first edition. I’ve always liked the passage from the first chapter where he says,

“I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them.
My aim is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution . . . I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is “needed” before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents’ “interests,” I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.”

Barry Goldwater mentions one Supreme Court case in that book: Wicker v. Filburn, many know it. A farmer in California wants to grow 20 acres of wheat. The government says you can only grow 10 acres of wheat. He said, by what authority do you tell me this? And they say, the Commerce Clause, and he said, well, I’m not even going to sell the wheat. I’m going feed it to my cattle, and they say to him, well, by your inactivity, by not doing anything, can you indirectly affect the price of wheat, and they enforce this. That ruling was in the ’40s. For 60 and 70 years now we’ve been working with this notion that the Commerce Clause says that our government can do anything. Until Obamacare came along.

They scoffed at us when we said it wasn’t constitutional. Nancy Pelosi looked like a deer in the headlights; she couldn’t believe that anyone would question the constitutionality. Judge Napolitano asked Representative Clyburn about the constitutionality and Representative Clyburn readily admitted, most of the things we do in Washington have no constitutional authority. It is amazing and appalling.
This Supreme Court case that will be more, about much more than health care. It’s going to be about whether or not we believe that our government should be restrained by the Constitution. I think for 60 or 70 years we’ve been gradually going down this road of becoming more of a majoritarian rule, a democracy. Jefferson said democracy would be nothing more than a mob rule. Our Founding Fathers knew the difference between a republic and a democracy.

Our understanding of the Commerce Clause has become so broad that I often will say, if my shoes were made in Tennessee, they’ll regulate my walking in Kentucky. Recently Senator Coburn in one of the committee hearings asked Elena Kagan, he said, well, do you think the government through the Commerce Clause could regulate you eat three vegetables a day? Her response was, yes.

It is important who the next president will be. It is important who is on the Supreme Court. And we may better make darn certain that we get the right person in 2012. We face a looming debt crisis. It’s worse than you can imagine. It really is coming upon us quickly. I went to a presentation this week and they said that japan reached a point of no return. They say when its debt equals its economy, when your total debt is about equal to your gross domestic product you approach a point of no return. We’re quickly approaching that point, and what kind of leadership are we getting, though? The president of the United States wants to sound like he’s now a conservative. Says he’s going to freeze spending. Well, he’s going to freeze this much of the budget, at inflated levels of spending, and over five years he’s going to add $3.8 trillion to the debt.

It’s unacceptable. But you are the conservatives, and you drive the debate. So what I’m going to tell you next you may not want to hear, but it’s true. The House Republican proposal will freeze this much of the budget at 2008 levels and will add $3 trillion to the debt over five years. It’s too little. It’s not enough. It’s too timid, and we must be more bold.

They’re talking about cutting $35 billion. We spend $35 billion in five days. We add $35 billion to the debt in nine days. It’s not enough, and we will not ruin in our country unless we think more boldly. We must cut more spending. We must cut out the unconstitutional programs we never intended to have here. We used to say as Republicans that we thought education was for the states and the localities and now we have a Department of Education that is consuming $100 billion and it’s time we go back to the Republican roots that says, we believe in abolishing the Department of Education.
There is, though, one compromise we will have to make as conservatives. Those of you who know me know I don’t like to compromise, but there is one compromise you have to make. And this is the compromise, and you have to think this through.

We have always been, as conservatives against the domestic welfare, the abuses of domestic spending, for making domestic spending smaller, but you have to understand that that’s this much of the budget. If you cut out all discretionary non-military spending you don’t balance the budget. You can’t get there unless you look at the whole budget. That means we will have to have entitlement reform. But here’s the compromise that also conservatives will have to make. We will have to look long and hard at the military budget -- I knew there was going to be -- I knew there had to be some dissension somewhere.

The thing is, is that the most important thing that our government does, the one primary and most important constitutional thing our government does is our national defense. Absolutely. But you cannot -- you cannot say that the doubling of the military budget in the last 10 years has been done wisely and there’s not any waste in it. If you do -- if you refuse to acknowledge that there’s any waste can be culled from the military budget, you are a big-government conservative and can you not lay claim to balancing the budget.

With regard to entitlement reform, it has to happen. There isn’t any question that it will happen. It’s whether we do it gradually in a rational manner, or whether we wait until there’s a collapse of the country and we have to do it dramatically. Everybody knows the answer. I said it in my campaign. The Republicans attacked me for it and so did the Democrats. The age of Social Security will have to gradually rise. I got a note from a young man who worked in the campaign, and he maybe here today. He said, thanks for proposing the $500 billion in budget cuts, thanks for tackling the Social Security problem and then, I wouldn’t mind opting out of Social Security.

Is there anybody here who would like to opt out of Social Security?

Our country stands at a precipice. America’s greatness and exceptionalism are because we chose economic and political freedom. We are not inherently exceptional. We are exceptional because we chose freedom and we chose to protect that freedom from tyranny with the Constitution. That’s why we’re exceptional. We can main that that exceptionalism, that freedom, that Constitution, but it won’t happen lying down. We must choose bold leadership as we go into 2012. We need bold leadership. We can’t have this incrementalism. It’s not going to be enough. You need bold leaders who will stand up and say, this should be done in Washington, but this should be left to states and localities respectively. One person can make a difference.

I think we are shaking it up. I think the Tea Party has had an enormous influence. This town is now talking about the debt and deficit constantly. The Tea Party brought that to Washington. You can continue to pressure them but don’t let up. It’s not enough to have Republicans in charge. We are not inherently exceptional as Republicans. You keep us so by keeping the pressure on. Let’s choose bold leadership in 2012.

Thank you for having me.

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Why Paul Was Right to Oppose Laser-Pointer Law

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,2046475,00.html#ixzz1D8GVTaKh

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul listens during the first meeting of the U.S. Senate Tea Party Caucus on Capitol Hill in Washington on Jan. 27, 2011

The Tea Party darling’s opposition to criminalizing the act of aiming a laser pointer at an airplane is drawing lots of ridicule. But the real idiots are the other Senators passing a law that makes no sense

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