The Tea Party scored its two biggest triumphs last year with the
election of Sens. Marco Rubio and Rand Paul. Both were discouraged
from running by leaders of their own party. Both had to overcome
the determined opposition of the Republican establishment to make
it through their primaries in the first place.
Paul and Rubio were both uncharacteristically honest about the
need for entitlement reform, going so far as to contemplate
means-testing Social Security even though they needed the votes of
senior citizens. Paul was running in Kentucky, where about 60
percent of the registered voters are Democrats. Rubio stood for
election in Florida, a retirement mecca.
Both won in November by double-digit margins and have pressured
Republican leaders from the right on spending now that they are in
office. Rubio has railed against increasing the federal
government’s debt ceiling. Paul has proposed his own five-year plan
to balance the budget and has chastised Paul Ryan for not going far
enough. Both senators voted against the budget deal struck by
President Obama and House Republicans.
Their similarities stop at the water’s edge. True, when Obama
decided to wage “kinetic military action” against Libya, both
senators recognized it for what it was — war — and demanded that
Congress authorize the intervention. But Paul and Rubio diverged
sharply from there.
In April, Paul introduced a sense of the Senate resolution
affirming the following 2007 quote from then-candidate Barack
Obama: “The President does not have 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.”
The move so flummoxed Democrats that Senate Majority Leader Harry
Reid abruptly adjourned the Senate for the weekend rather than have
his colleagues vote on the amendment while Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL)
bizarrely claimed President Bush had broken precedent by consulting
Congress before going into Iraq and Afghanistan.
Senator Paul also insisted that Congress vote to formally
declare war against Libya and made fairly clear he intended to vote
against any such declaration. Neither of Paul’s Libya proposals
went anywhere. The Senate ultimately voted down his language
agreeing with Obama nearly four years ago, since the Democratic
majority wanted to agree with Obama today.
Rubio also proposed a resolution authorizing the use of force in
Libya. But his idea was to make regime change the official policy
of the U.S. government, and unlike Paul he fully intended to vote
in favor. “This resolution should… state that removing Moamar
Qadhafi from power is in our national interest and therefore should
authorize the President to accomplish this goal,” Rubio wrote in a
late March letter to Reid. “To that end, the resolution should urge
the President to immediately recognize the Interim Transitional
National Council as the legitimate government in Libya.”
Libya is just one specific example of a broader disagreement
between the two Tea Party favorites over U.S. foreign policy. Paul,
the son of the noninterventionist presidential candidate
Congressman Ron Paul, believes restraint in the resort to arms is
an integral part of limited government. Rubio, the son of Cuban
exiles, sees a robust foreign policy as indispensable to American
world leadership.
On the campaign trail in Kentucky, Paul answered a question
about issues of war and peace this way: “I think the most important
thing we do with the federal government is our national defense,
bar none, but then I think it’s open to debate what’s in our
national defense.” In his recent book The
Tea Party Goes to Washington, Paul complained, “Many
Republicans treat war like Democrats treat welfare.”
In a fascinating
interview with Robert Costa of National Review Online,
Rubio sounded a very different note by inveighing against what he
described as isolationism. “There is no replacement for America in
the world,” Rubio told Costa. “If America withdraws from the world
stage, it will create a vacuum, and that vacuum will not be filled
by someone better than us.”
“It is so important that conservatism does not translate into
isolationism,” Rubio continued. “Isolationism has never worked for
America. It is not going to work in the 21st century.” Rubio’s
chief of staff is Cesar Conda, the former Dick Cheney aide who
during the 2010 primary season fired off an email warning to
Republican hawks: “On foreign policy, [global war on terror],
Gitmo, Afghanistan, Rand Paul is NOT one of us.”
This debate is only going to intensify after the death of Osama
bin Laden. Many conservatives are likely going to look at the
successful strike on the al Qaeda leader and conclude it is
possible to fight terrorism without nation-building or invading and
occupying countries until they are democratic. Afghanistan is
hardly more a functioning democracy than when bin Laden fled a
decade ago. It is unclear how sincerely our putative ally in
Pakistan was really helping us search for the 9/11 murderer. Some
Pakistani forces may have been sheltering bin Laden as much as the
Taliban.
Still other conservatives will contend that without a U.S.
military presence overseas, complemented by the intelligence
gathered through enhanced interrogation, there is no way to
identify and disrupt terrorist networks. “It’s important that we
remain vigilant in our efforts to defeat terrorist enemies and
protect the American people,” House Speaker John Boehner said in
his post-bin Laden press conference. “This makes our engagement in
places like Pakistan and Afghanistan more important not less.”
Rand Paul and Marco Rubio have already established themselves as
two of the most conservative members of the Senate. Rubio invokes
Jesse Helms, Paul Robert Taft. They both quote Ronald Reagan. On
most issues, they will be allies. On foreign policy, they couldn’t
be further apart.
