Posted on 12/29/2012 12:40:59 PM PST by mangonc2
Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), libertarian hero and constitutionalist congressman, will end the last term of his political career as the number two conservative in the House of Representatives behind Jeff Flake (R-AZ), according to a ranking system of all members of congress created by two political science professors.
The "DW-Nominate" ranking system, created by University of Georgia political science professor Keith Poole and New York University professor Howard Rosenthal, ranks all 636 legislators in the House and the Senate and is available on Voteview.com.
According to the rankings, Paul held the number one spot for multiple years, despite being behind Flake in recent ones.
When he first won a special election in 1976 to the 94th Congress, Congressman Paul immediately became the most conservative member in the House, according to the ranking system.
While Paul lost re-election to the House in the next Congress, by the 96th Congress Paul won his House seat back and was ranked the number one conservative for three consecutive congresses, which lasted from January 3, 1979 to January 3, 1985.
No later than 1987, Paul, at odds with the Reagan administration's and the Republican Party's profligate spending ways, wrote a letter of resignation to the then-RNC Chair Frank Fahrenkopf expressing his reasons for leaving the Grand Old Party, before going on to join the Libertarian Party and eventually becoming its nominee for president in 1988.
The letter displayed his commitment to conservative, limited government ideals, even at the expense of leaving the Republican Party to advance them.
In the letter, he began by expressing his high hopes for the Reagan administration-but then sharply criticized Reagan. He told a story of how Republicans, far from critiquing Ronald Reagan for his un-conservative spending ways, actually began in some ways to defend big government.
"In 1976 I was impressed with Ronald Reagan's program and was one of the four members of Congress who endorsed his candidacy," he wrote.
"Since 1981, however, I have gradually and steadily grown weary of the Republican Party's efforts to reduce the size of the federal government," he continued.
"Since then Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party have given us skyrocketing deficits, and astoundingly a doubled national debt. How is it that the party of balanced budgets, with control of the White House and Senate, accumulated red ink greater than all previous administrations put together? Tip O'Neill, although part of the problem, cannot alone be blamed," Paul wrote.
Paul said of Republicans at the time that although they "rightly chastised Carter for his $38 billion deficit...they ignore or even defend deficits of $220 billion, as government spending has grown 10.4 percent per year since Reagan took office."
In the letter, Paul did not call Reagan's economic plan "conservative," as Reagan is claimed to be and is remembered as, but instead called "Reaganomics" "warmed-over Keynesianism," referring to the economic philosophy inspired by the 20th century economist John Maynard Keynes which basically maintains that budget deficits and publicly-directed spending are the way to economic recovery, and that it's the government's job to smooth out the business cycle.
He blasted Reagan's famous 1986 tax reform as giving more power to the IRS, and called Reagan out for raising taxes. He ended the letter by saying that Republicans have expanded the "worst aspects" of the "Democratic agenda" and called them their own, and suggested that the Republican party had zero credibility "as a force to reduce the size of government."
By the late 1990s, Paul re-entered politics as a Republican after his first presidential run for the Libertarian Party and has been in Congress ever since.
Just as he entered politics as the number one conservative (according to the ranking system), he re-entered politics as the most conservative politician in the House of Representatives and maintained that position from the 105th Congress (beginning January 1997) to the 106th Congress (ending on January 3, 2001).
From the 107th Congress onward, Paul ranked as the second most conservative House member, according to the list, behind Jeff Flake.
His son, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a possible entrant into the 2016 presidential races, is currently ranked as the most conservative politician in the United States Senate.
You say that like it's a bad thing, but we haven't had isolationism since WWI. Is it better that we install Muslim governments in Balkans and a Caliphate in the Middle East?
Libertarian maybe... but he is in no way a Conservative.
LLS
I LOVE reading Ron Paul threads!
I’ve never been able to figure out why Michael Jackson is looking daggers at Jar-jar Binks.
Good riddance to this traitor
...this one time at band camp...
As a legislator, he authored approximately 620 pieces of legislation, but only one was passed, the sale of the old U.S. customs house to the Galveston Historical Foundation.
Let's not even get into the method he used to put millions of dollars of pork into every spending bill.
A little taste of the LRon circus ...
LRon Paul Wants Kucinich in his Cabinet
Ron Paul booed during Tea Party debate after Osama bin Laden answer
Ron Paul votes to homosexualize the US Military
Even more idiotic is that these two liberals ranked Jeff Flake #1. Flake was pushing Illegal Alien Amnesty with liberal Democrat Luis Guitteriez...and Flake is also pro open borders....that is not conservative
Ron Paul is 100% correct on the Federal Reserve and a few other things. His foreign policy is fantasy and surrender
I don't disagree, but Rep. Paul had decades to persuade the US Congress and the voters of the US to make the necessary changes, didn't he?
Ron Paul, Conservative? Fiscally, yes. On foreign policy though, he doesn’t understand Islam.
I believe that when we must go to war, we must have a Congressional declaration of war as the Constitution mandates,
It’s amazing how few in the federal government actually support the US Constitution.
Audit the fed
That would be the most important bill passed in my lifetime if it would actually be done.
this has to be some kind of joke article.
The Constitution gives three methods for going to war. Formal declaration (and it doesn't say how it has to be worded), punishing 'piracy and offenses against the laws of nations', and putting down rebellions. We did have Congressional authorization for both Iraq and Afghanistan. Funny thing is Paul says that Iraq wasn't legal because the 'authorization for the use of force' in his mind isn't a declaration of war but he voted for a similarly worded authorization for Afghanistan.
Like most things Paul writes, it was written without any teeth or enforcement methods.
But, then there’s his voting record and floor speeches. And the meaning of is becomes the meaning of was.
Didn’t Congress give authority to Bush to declare war? It seems to me that such an act would have to be done by an amendment to the Constitution to be legal.
This actually came up in the Lincoln movie. There was a very close vote on the amendment that outlawed slavery so the Speaker cast a vote.
Except in ties or exceptionally important matters the speaker usually doesn't register a vote.
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