Posted on 05/20/2015 6:41:13 AM PDT by wagglebee
PHILADELPHIA, PA, May 19, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Rand Paul wants to be president – but abortion is less of an issue for him than the national debt, the senator said yesterday.
Paul had completed a campaign stop at Philadelphia's National Constitution Center, where he attacked both Bill and Hillary Clinton with relish, when a local media personality asked him about abortion.
“I will answer the question as honestly as I can,” he said. “I didn’t run for office because of this issue. It wasn’t what got me to leave my practice” to enter politics.
Instead, it was the nation's ballooning debt that made the younger Paul run for the open Senate seat in Kentucky.
“I ran for office mainly because I became concerned that we’re going to destroy the country with debt – that we would borrow much money, that we would just destroy the currency,” he said.
The national debt has exploded from less than $1 trillion in 1980 to a staggering $18 trillion and climbing. President Obama, whose annual deficits have exceeded $1 trillion, has added more to the debt than every president from George Washington to Bill Clinton combined.
Pressed on abortion, Paul told the audience that, under the Constitution's federalist principles, abortion would be handled “best by the states.” Conservative jurists have debated whether the Constitution gives the federal government the right to regulate abortion.
To make national policy, the nation needs to decide “when life begins,” he said, according to The Daily Caller. “I think we go down all kinds of rabbit holes talking about other stuff.”
He referenced his own history as an ophthalmologist who treated premature newborns. “If someone were to hurt that one-pound baby in the neonatal nursery, it’s a problem. That baby has rights,” he said. “But we somewhat inconsistently say that seven-pound baby at birth or just before birth has no rights.”
His remarks echoed his rejoinder to a reporter last month to ask Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, “Is it OK to kill a seven-pound baby in the uterus?” Congresswoman Schultz replied that there should be no legal restrictions on late-term abortion. The Democratic Party platform currently calls for taxpayer-funded abortion through all nine months of pregnancy.
Deciding when Constitutional protections and the right to life apply is the key goal to advancing pro-life legislation, Paul said yesterday.
“We just have to figure when we agree life begins,” he concluded.
The first-term senator, who will also run for re-election in Kentucky next year, has a strong pro-life voting record – as strong as anyone can in a chamber where pro-life legislation was bottled by former Majority Leader Harry Reid until this year. In 2013, he introduced the Life Begins at Conception Act.
The previous year, he had been stopped by TSA agents while en route to address the annual March for Life. “I don’t think a civilization can long endure that does not have respect for all human life – born and not yet born,” he has said.
He has, however, said he supports the use of Plan B, a potentially abortifacient method of "emergency contraception," as birth control.
His concern over the proper role of the government under an originalist reading of the Constitution has caused Paul, an outspoken personal supporter of life and marriage, to question whether the government should withdraw from marriage contracts and establish alternate legal arrangements.
Framed by Independence Hall, Paul touted his libertarian credentials as someone who could attract unconventional support to the Republican ticket, including minorities who support his opposition to militarizing local police forces. Such opposition exploded in the city during riots in nearby Baltimore.
“I see no reason why a 20-ton mine resistant ambush protection vehicle should ever roll down any city in our country,” he said on Monday. “There is no reason that the police force should be the same as the army.”
Paul also stated he would oppose reauthorization of the Patriot Act, although he conceded the votes did not exist to impeded final passage.
He was particularly incensed over the NSA's broad interception of phone calls without a warrant.
“That's what we fought the Revolution over!” he said. "Our Founding Fathers would be appalled to know that we are writing one single warrant and collecting everyone's phone records all the time.”
Excellent post.
Or "The People".
Which is why the overturned vote of the people by the black robes is such an egregious violation of the US Constitution.
Thanks!
Your posts at 79 is brilliant, and I am also most always able to agree with what Georgia Girl 2 is saying.
The difference is in having HOPE and in seeing REALITY. The SCOTUS appointments are generally very tricky and so many are disappointing. We are decades into nothing happening to save babies, sadly. Now comes gay marriage. What comes next will be worse without reversals of these laws.
Thank you for writing on this subject. Rita
I am now struggling with diabetic ulcers on one foot which heal slowly. Whatever spiritual help you may provide would be sincerely appreciated. When the time comes when God wants me, He knows where to find me. I am convinced, however, that the prayers of many FReepers are part of why God pulled me through to date.
If you contact me by FReepmail, get my attention on any thread and tell me I have mail and I will check for it. Normally, I do not monitor FReepmail otherwise.
May God bless you and all of your efforts.
Thank you for your kind words. See also my post #105 to Arthur McGowan. God bless you and yours!
Thank you for being you! God bless!
Likewise, my friend.
Nice try... but you have cherry picked. The two cases decided there was a constitutional right to abortion
“Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), is a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court on the issue of abortion. Decided simultaneously with a companion case, Doe v. Bolton, the Court ruled 7–2 that a right to privacy under the due process clause of the 14th Amendment extended to a woman’s decision to have an abortion, but that this right must be balanced against the state’s two legitimate interests in regulating abortions: protecting prenatal life and protecting women’s health. Arguing that these state interests became stronger over the course of a pregnancy, the Court resolved this balancing test by tying state regulation of abortion to the third trimester of pregnancy.”
How EXACTLY did I "cherry pick" when I quoted from Blackmun's actual opinion where he conceded that personhood of the baby negated any right to privacy?
Your unsourced quote (perhaps "How to be Pro-Abortion for Dummies") doesn't even address the inherent rights of the baby.
SCOTUS has NEVER said that there is a "right" to commit murder, even if it was done in private. And, even if they did, there is nothing sacrosanct about their rulings regardless of what the left would have people believe.
How many times have you been zotted in the past?
If hearts are right, then the correct policies will follow.
Law is a great teacher, even for those who do not moronically believe that actions are moral if they are legal.
The vast majority of people cannot comprehend the statement: “It is legal, but it is immoral.”
You cannot pick out a single paragraph and go AHA m point is proved. It is not. The law of the land is that abortion is legal. You can hate that all you want butyour paragraph quotation does NOTHING to change the overall ruling
Nonsense. And I didn't pick out a single paragraph from some unnamed source, YOU DID. I posted a passage of the ACTUAL DECISION issued in Roe where it clearly states that the case for abortion COLLAPSES with the establishment of personhood.
You either believe that a baby is a person or you don't. Which do you believe? Do you believe that the baby might develop into something other than a person, and if so what? Does the mother have a giraffe inside of here, because in that case she certainly has every right to remove it. What she DOES NOT have is the right to kill another person.
The law of the land is that abortion is legal.
First of all, the Supreme Court DOES NOT and NEVER HAS been empowered to make law, there is simply no foundation for believing otherwise.
Secondly, murder of a person has NEVER been legal anywhere in the United States.
You can hate that all you want butyour paragraph quotation does NOTHING to change the overall ruling
The ruling is just that, it is a ruling that says abortion is fine as long as what is being aborted isn't a person; otherwise, it is illegal. The fact that nearly all, including the vast majority of those who claim to be pro-life, have misinterpreted, and subsequently miscodified, the ruling doesn't change the facts.
I must say that I find your defense of Roe somewhat troubling. You seem to be going out of your way to justify it as somehow being lawful.
Secondly, murder of a person has NEVER been legal anywhere in the United States.
First, let's look at your first point. Ben Carson actually spoke to this idea about a week ago and was ridiculed for it. He made a distinction between laws passed by a legislature and what he called 'judicial laws'. His opinion was that we actually were under no obligation to follow judicial law. The reality is that Roe v Wade truly is 'judicial law'. Abortion has NEVER been considered by our Congress. There has never been a vote. Abortion truly is judicially imposed law. Purely judicially imposed.
Your second point is that murder has never been legal anyplace in the US. That is true. One cannot take any life until a trial and conviction by a jury of peers for a capital offense.
A baby has obviously not committed a capital offense. An aborted baby has received no trial. It's death by abortion is, therefore, murder.
The only excuse would be that the baby is somehow not a human life. As you point out, it certainly isn't a giraffe.
If God gives the right to life -- and I believe He does -- then abortion is murder.
Andrew Jackson is purported to have said (his actual quote is far less flamboyant), "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!" The Supreme Court has ZERO enforcement power.
All Congress has ever needed to do was pass a law acknowledging the obvious fact that preborn babies are persons and that would be the end of abortion. Any subsequent Congress would have an incredibly difficult job of repealing such legislation because they would be faced with the impossible task of explaining why a baby isn't a person.
I tend to agree with Paul. I already know he is Pro-Life. The abortion issue will only change when our hearts change. Not at the ballot box and not in a presidential debate.
I agree that Congress could fix this immediately. I also believe it will require a 2/3+1 majority in the House and Senate to overcome a presidential veto, because repealing abortion will fly in the face of the selfishness of our era.
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