Are Donald Trump and Russia blackmailing Rand Paul?

| 8:50 pm EDT April 23, 2018
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Remember back when Republican Senator Rand Paul acted like he was going to vote against his own party’s tax scam bill, and then he voted for it anyway? So when he announced this month that he was planning to vote against Donald Trump’s unsuitable and extremist Secretary of State nominee Mike Pompeo, there was little reason to believe him. Sure enough, Rand Paul just screwed over America yet again – but he may have hurt himself in the process.

Rand Paul publicly declared that he was voting against the Pompeo nomination in committee. That ensured the committee would vote Pompeo down, as the Republicans only have a one-vote majority on that committee. But today Paul announced that, after a phone call with Donald Trump, he’s now voting “yes” on Pompeo after all. This means Pompeo will become Secretary of State, as the Republicans have the fifty-one votes needed to confirm him in the upcoming full Senate vote. So what is Paul’s deal?

Why does Rand Paul keep taking these supposedly principled stands against the worst proposals made by his own party, only to quickly cave for no apparent reason? It raises questions of whether Paul may be trying to use these tactics to get Trump and the party to give him personal favors, or if perhaps Trump might be using his Russian connections to blackmail Paul into changing his mind. After all, we know that Russian hackers targeted several presidential candidates in the 2016 election, from both parties, in an effort to clear a path for Trump. Paul was one of those candidates.

While we may never learn the real reason why Rand Paul keeps doing this, the mere fact that he keeps doing this is enough to make him look like an idiot. He doesn’t have to run for reelection in the Senate for another five and a half years. But if Rand Paul is thinking about running for president in 2020, by which time Donald Trump and Mike Pence will presumably have been ousted or too incriminated to run, this nonsense will be used against him by every one of his opponents.