Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul announced Tuesday morning that he’ll be running in 2016 — for a second term in the Senate, that is.
“I hope to continue together in the task of repairing and revitalizing our great nation,” Paul said in his statement, touting the endorsement of Senate Majority Leader-Elect Mitch McConnell.
But this isn’t just a precursor to Paul’s expected presidential campaign — it could actually derail it. Kentucky law says no one can run for two federal offices at once, meaning Paul can’t hedge his bets in 2016 and keep his Senate seat if he loses the presidency, something he may want to do. (It’s not uncommon, either: Vice President Joe Biden and Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan both successfully ran for vice president while on the ballot for Congressional offices.)
Paul and his team have been attempting to change the law, but when Democrats held control of the state’s House last month, effectively scuttling their efforts to change the law on the books, they began considering other options. Arguing that the law is unconstitutional, the National Journal reports they’ve considered challenging the law in court, though that could backfire. Currently, the top option is abolishing the state’s presidential primary in favor of a caucus system so Paul’s name doesn’t technically appear on a ballot, thus avoiding the letter of the law, which states “no candidate’s name shall appear on any voting machine or absentee ballot more than once.”
There’s an added benefit to a caucus from Paul’s perspective, as the state could move it up in the calendar to March, something that might help him gain momentum in a presidential race.
Paul hasn’t formally declared his presidential ambitions (and according to the most recent CNN/ORC poll, few are jumping on his bandwagon just yet), but it’s clear the Republican is heading in that direction.
His rhetoric in recent months has begun to build up his own candidacy and increasingly denigrated that of his presumed opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The latter was clear on Tuesday, when during a Wall Street Journal/CEO Council, he again condemned the seven-month long Libyan intervention, declaring the country to be in a worse state than it was when the U.S. and more than a dozen other countries intervened.
“Look at Hillary’s war in Libya,” Paul said. “Libya’s now chaotic, there are jihadists running everywhere, I think we’re less safe now.”
He also hit back against a moderator’s criticism that his anti-interventionist foreign policy would hurt him in a Republican primary.
“One, that fails to understand where people are in the country. But two- it also fails to understand who I am and what I support,” Paul said, arguing the “non-intervention” view was widely held by Americans who still felt a strong defense was key. “This is not a small movement, nor is it easy to say that people like myself who believe in less intervention can be characterized as people who don’t believe in a strong national defense. That’s a caricature and I will have to fight that.”
It was also clear in his latest Op-Ed in Breitbart on Benghazi.









