Rare News Desk
Congressman Adam Kinzinger ought to have a fresh perspective on the future of the GOP. One of the youngest Republicans in the House, he was elected during the Tea Party wave of 2010 in the blue state of Illinois. He served five tours of duty after 9/11 and was named the Southeastern Wisconsin Red Cross’s “Hero of the Year” for disarming a man with a knife who had cut a woman’s throat on the streets of Milwaukee.
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Asked about the 2016 presidential race on ABC’s This Week on Sunday, Kinzinger said he was thrilled about the Republican bench—with one exception. “The one person I don’t want to see is someone like Rand Paul who put out budgets to cut the military in half,” he said. “I think that would be devastating for our party right now on national security.”
Kinzinger was referring to Paul’s 2011 budget, released during his early months in the Senate, which was dinged by many for being too austere. Still, bisecting the military is a tall order, even for a libertarian—and it’s not even close to what Paul proposed. A skeptical Politifact noted, “Overall, Paul’s budget represents a reduction in defense spending of about 23 percent compared to 2011 levels.” Kinzinger offered up the specious defense that he’d been referring only to discretionary spending, but this didn’t fly with Politifact, which rated his claim unequivocally “False.”
Kinzinger calls himself a “defense Republican,” which until recently would have been a redundancy on par with “tax-and-spend liberal.” In almost total unison, Republicans hammered Bill Clinton for downsizing the military during the nineties and supported a more generous budget for the Pentagon during the aughts. Dick Cheney summed up the opinion of the GOP in 2000 when he said that under Democrats the armed forces had been “overextended, taken for granted, and neglected.”
Today many in the GOP believe the military has been overextended again, but this time backed by every dime it wants from an obsequious Congress. This has produced a rift, with some Republicans continuing their deference to the Pentagon and support for the Bush Doctrine, and others calling for a sharper eye on military waste and a return to foreign policy realism. This is a necessary and healthy debate. But the defense Republican camp has a habit of demagoguing the budget cutter camp, especially when it comes to the de facto leader of the budget cutters, Rand Paul.
Take the charge that Paul and other likeminded Republicans are isolationists, repeated ad infinitum by a parade of hawks, including Kinzinger. This is patently false. It isn’t just that Paul supports bombing the Islamic State and economic sanctions against Putin’s Russia, not policies typically associated with Fortress America. It’s that there isn’t a single elected lawmaker alive today who completes the isolationist checklist: shuttering our foreign bases, walling ourselves off with tariffs, completely disengaging from the world. Even the elder Paul supports free trade.
“Isolationist” is not the antithesis to “neoconservative” or “hawk”; it’s a musty relic used by those seeking to cramp modern thinking into the 1930s. It’s become to us what “fascism” was to George Orwell: a word that through overuse “now has no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’”
Nothing Paul has said or done emits even a whiff of isolationism; in fact most of what he’s proposed are incremental reforms designed to be palatable to more hawkish Republicans. Kinzinger might not like Paul’s 2011 budget, but what of his amendment to stop military aid to Egypt’s combustive government last year, supported by no less than John McCain (after he’d initially opposed it)? Or Paul’s plan to audit the Pentagon, an agency that’s skirted the requirement to annually open its books every year since 1990? These aren’t radical overhauls; they’re sensible proposals that are worthy of discussion.
And none of this is particularly new. The GAO has been warning about Pentagon profligacy for years—among dozens of examples, the watchdog ran a partial audit and found that $70 billion had been wasted over two years on big weapons systems alone. Senator Tom Coburn’s office fished out $68 billion in military spending that had gone towards operational necessities like a USDA-partnered reality cooking show and a Star Trek workshop.
In light of all this, a little hedge-trimming at the Department of Defense just seems prudent.
Still, a defense hawk could certainly argue that Paul’s earlier plan to eliminate a quarter of military spending was a bit hasty, especially with bombs once again falling on Mesopotamia (his 2013 budget struck those cuts in favor of a net increase for the Pentagon). But then Kinzinger should make that case instead of mischaracterizing Paul’s position and dismissing him as an extremist.
Paul is a compelling and thoughtful alternative to the stale GOP elite. He deserves engagement, not cheap demagoguery.
