Rand Paul at CPAC 2013

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) who is a prospective 2016 presidential candidate spoke at CPAC 2013 which kicked off today.  You can find the transcript of his speech and a video below.

TRANSCRIPT AS PREPARED FOR DELIVERY:

I have a message for the President, a message that is loud and clear, a message that doesn’t mince words.

The message for the President is that no one person gets to decide the law, no one person gets to decide your guilt or innocence.

My question to the President was about more than just killing Americans on American soil.

My question was about whether Presidential power has limits.

Lincoln put it well when he wrote, “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man, give him power.”

President Obama who seemed, once upon a time, to respect civil liberties, has become the President who signed a law allowing for the indefinite detention of an American citizen.

Indeed, a law that allows an American citizen to be sent to Guantanamo Bay without a trial.

President Obama defends his signing of the bill by stating that he has no intention of detaining any American citizen without a trial.

Likewise, he defended his possible targeted Drone strikes against Americans on American soil by indicating that he has no intention of doing so.

Well, my thirteen hour filibuster was a message to the President.

Good intentions are not enough.

The presidential oath of office states ‘I WILL protect, preserve, and defend the Constitution,’ NOT ‘I intend to preserve, protect, and defend the constitution.’

Mr. President, good intentions are not enough. We want to know, will you or won’t you defend the Constitution?

Eisenhower wrote,

“How far can you go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?”

If we destroy our enemy but lose what defines our freedom in the process, have we really won?

If we allow one man to charge Americans as enemy combatants and indefinitely detain or drone them, then what exactly is it our brave young men and women are fighting for?

Montesquieu wrote that there can be no liberty if you combine the Executive and the Legislative branches. Likewise, there can be no justice if you combine the Executive and Judicial branch into one.

We separated arrest and accusation from trial and verdict for a reason. When Lewis Carroll’s white queen shouts sentence first, verdict afterwards, the reader’s response is supposed to be ‘But that would be absurd!’

In our country, the police can arrest, but only your peers can convict. We prize our Bill of Rights like no other country. Our Bill of Rights is what defines us and makes us exceptional.

To those who would dismiss this debate as frivolous, I say tell that to the heroic young men and women who have sacrificed their limbs and lives, tell it to the 6,000 parents whose kids died as American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, tell them that the Bill of Rights is no big deal.

Tell it to Sergeant J.D. Williams, of Auburn Kentucky, who sacrificed himself to save his fellow soldiers. Tell J.D., who lost both legs and an arm; tell him his sacrifice was great but that we had to suspend the Bill of Rights he fought for.

Yes, the filibuster was about drones, but also about much more. Do we have a Bill of Rights or not? Do we have a Constitution or not and will we defend it?

In his farewell speech in 1989, Ronald Reagan said: “As government expands, liberty contracts.”

He was right. Government cannot give us our liberty, our rights come from our Creator. But as government grows, liberty becomes marginalized. The collective takes precedent over the individual. Freedom shrinks.

And our government today is larger than it has ever been in the history of our country.

Everything that America has been, and everything we ever wish to be, is now threatened by the notion that you can have something for nothing, that you can have your cake and eat it too, that you can spend a trillion dollars every year that you don’t have.

The President seems to think we can keep adding to a $16 trillion debt. The President seems to think the country can continue to borrow $50,000 per second.

The President believes that we should just squeeze more money out of those who are working. He’s got it exactly backwards.

I’m here to tell you, what we need to do is leave more money in the pockets of those who earned it.

Look at how ridiculous Washington politicians have behaved over the sequester. The President did a big “woe is me” over a trillion dollar sequester that he endorsed and signed into law. Some Republicans joined him.

But the sequester didn’t even cut any spending. It just slowed the rate of growth. Even with the sequester, government will grow over $7 trillion over the next decade.

Only in Washington could an increase of $7 trillion in spending over a decade be called a cut.

After the sequester, it was announced that the White House would stop giving tours. Administration officials said that it was due to “cuts” imposed by the sequester.

Meanwhile the President found an extra $250 million to send to Egypt. You know, the country where mobs attacked our embassy, burned our flag, and chanted death to America.

You know, the country whose President recently stood by his spiritual leader, who called for death to Israel and all who support her.

I say-not a penny more to countries that burn our flag.

The President says he can’t find anything to cut except for White House tours.

Well what about the $3 million spent studying Monkeys on Meth. Does it really take $3 million to discover that monkeys, like humans, act crazy on Meth?

What about the $300,000 for a Robotic squirrel?  They wanted to study whether a squirrel that doesn’t wag its tail will be bitten by a rattlesnake.  Only problem, they couldn’t find a real squirrel to volunteer not to wag its tail.

Bottom line – a rattlesnake will bite the you-know-what out of a squirrel not wagging its tail.  Mr. President, maybe we could have cut robotic squirrels before white house tours.

For any of you college students looking for jobs, Uncle Sam’s got a job for you.   The pay is $5,000 per person.  The study is in Hawaii but the requirements are onerous —- you must like food.

The study is to develop a Menu for when we colonize mars.  Guess what a bunch of college students came up with……..Pizza.

You could cut just one of these programs and return to letting schoolchildren tour the White House.

This government is completely out-of-control. We desperately need a new course and new leadership.

The path forward for the Republican Party is rooted in respect for the Constitution and respect for the individual.

Part of that respect is allowing Americans to freely exercise one of their most basic rights, the right to bear arms.

You can’t protect the 2^nd Amendment though if you don’t have the Fourth Amendment.  If we are not secure in homes, if we are not secure in our persons and our papers, can we really believe that our right to bear arms will be secure?

We need to jealously guard all of our liberties.

The Facebook generation can detect falseness and hypocrisy a mile away. They are the core of the ‘leave me alone’ coalition.  They doubt that Social Security will be there for them.

They worry about jobs and money, rent and student loans.  They want leaders that won’t feed them a line of crap or sell them short. They aren’t afraid of individual liberty.

Ask them whether we should put a kid in jail for the nonviolent crime of drug use and you’ll hear a resounding no.

Ask them if they want to bail out Too-Big-To-Fail banks with their tax dollars.

And you’ll hear a hell no.

There is nothing conservative about bailing out Wall Street.

Likewise, there is nothing progressive about billion dollar loans to millionaires to build solar panels.

The Republican Party has to change—-by going forward to the classical and timeless ideas enshrined in our Constitution. When we understand that that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, then we will become the dominant national party again.

It is time for us to revive Reagan’s law: For liberty to expand, government must now contract. For the economy to grow, government must get out of the way.

This month, I will propose a five-year balanced budget.

My budget eliminates the Department of Education, and devolves power and money back to the states where they belong.

With my five-year budget, millions of jobs would be created by cutting the corporate income tax in half, by creating a flat personal income tax of 17%, and by cutting the regulations that are strangling American businesses.

The only stimulus ever proven to work is leaving more money in the hands of those who earned it!

The Constitution must be our guide. For conservatives to win nationally, we must stand for something. We must stand on principle.

We must stand for something so powerful and so popular that it brings together people from the left and the right and the middle.

We need a Republican Party that shows up on the Southside of Chicago and shouts at the top of our lungs ‘We are the party of jobs and opportunity.  The GOP is the ticket to the middle class.’

The GOP of old has grown stale and moss-covered,——I don’t think we need to name any names here, do we??—-

Our party is encumbered by an inconsistent approach to freedom. The new GOP, the GOP that will win again, will need to embrace liberty in both the economic and personal sphere.

If we are going to have a Republican Party that can win, liberty needs to be the backbone of the GOP.

We must have a message that is broad. Our vision must be broad. And that vision must be based on freedom.

There are millions of Americans, young and old, native and immigrant, black, white and brown, who simply seek to live free, free to practice their religion, free to choose where they send their kids to school, free to choose their own healthcare, free to keep the fruit of their own labor, free to live without government constantly being on their back.

I will stand for them.

I will stand for you.

I will stand for our prosperity and our freedom.

And I ask everyone who values liberty to stand with me.

Thank you and God Bless America.