Judging Freedom - Fauci, Infrastructure, Senate Decorum, & Russians with Senator Rand Paul

Episode Date: November 17, 2021

Senator Rand Paul joins me today on Judging Freedom. Dr. Paul is the Senator from the great state of Kentucky. Our discussion begins with the over-exposed Dr. Anthony Fauci, continues with a discussion on the recent infrastructure bill, and finishes with a talk on Senate decorum in the hallowed chamber. Bonus: I ask Senator Paul about the 100,000 Russian troops along the Ukrainian border. #Libertarian #RandPaul #JudgeNapolitanoSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Save $80 with code SPACE80 at Talkspace.com. Hello everyone, welcome to Judging Freedom. Judge Andrew Napolitano here in my new podcast where I get to say whatever I think and talk to whoever I want to about whatever the topical issues are of the moment. I'm absolutely thrilled to have my longtime friend and a person whom I admire so dearly for his personal courage, for his understanding of medicine, and for his understanding of the Constitution, Senator from Kentucky, Senator and Dr. Rand Paul. Senator Paul, welcome to Judging Freedom. Good morning, Judge. Thanks for having me. Sure. You have made millions of friends in the libertarian community and even in the community of those who are rational people and don't even have a political label

by your dissecting of the excesses and the lies of Dr. Anthony Fauci. Can you make the case against Dr. Fauci or make the case why he shouldn't be where he is today? Well, I think Dr. Fauci is sort of a prime example of the debate over collectivism versus individualism. He is basically a collectivist at heart. He cares about the beehive and the total, but he doesn't really care about people as individuals. So if you have a son or a daughter that's 15 years old and they've had COVID, he doesn't care whether revaccinating them after they've already had it might cause myocarditis. He just says, well, the greater good is fine. The same way he didn't really seem to believe that a pandemic escaping a lab would be so much of a disaster.

He sort of weighs it in balance. You know, a couple million people die. Well, the research is worth it when you measure the risk of these pand taking unknown viruses, mixing them together and creating viruses that don't exist in nature, that the research would be worthwhile even if you had a pandemic. And that's really someone who doesn't really believe in the individual. He believes in the collective. When it comes to your rights or what you can do, he's been an advocate of every mandate, restricting your right to travel, restricting your right to go to school, all of these things in favor of sort of public health. One of the reasons you're so powerful and so effective on this, aside from your understanding and embrace of individual rights, is because you're a physician and he can't sort of talk

around you by using jargon that really physicians or almost any profession can do when they want to put somebody down. Why is he still there? Why do so many people still listen to him? How has he survived a Republican like Trump and now a liberal like Biden? Well, I think he's incredibly dangerous. And it's funny how the left says that the right is endangering people with information. It's actually the opposite of the truth. So for example, when Anthony Fauci tells you to wear a cloth masks, that is actually endangering your health because they don't work. So let's say your spouse, let's say you're 80 years old and your spouse has COVID and you're going to stay with them and take care of them. If you wear a cloth

mask while you're taking care of them, you're putting yourself at risk because they have no functional use. They do not protect you from the disease. So he's giving you bad advice. But here's the advice that's even worse than that. The idea that we don't count natural immunity, that we should immunize everyone equally in sort of just a random sort of way. Take India, for example. There's a billion people live in India and there's not enough vaccines. So wouldn't you want to prioritize those who are either elderly, at high risk, or who have not had the disease? Since he doesn't count the disease at all, you have millions of people in India taking his advice, including their public health doctors, and lining people up who have already had COVID. Well, that's a waste of the vaccine. And so thousands of people will die waiting to get a vaccine because he's saying,

oh, we should vaccinate everyone equally. It also goes back to sort of how we should have addressed this. Dr. Scott Atlas and others said we should have prioritized those at risk, the elderly, those in group home situations. And if we'd have done so, we could have done a better job and still could do a better job at targeting our resources. The other argument, and this is a little more difficult argument, but since children are not very much affected by this disease, we actually are probably better off children accumulating natural immunity in the natural way

because it's a broader immunity and probably will protect the rest of us better. And actually, this disease is less deadly in children than the seasonal flu. So everything Dr. Fauci has done has been sort of misinformation, wrong information, but he's actually endangered lives with this misinformation. One of my producers has been vaccinated and he and his spouse and they both came down with COVID, notwithstanding the vaccinations. How does one acquire natural immunity? Just by going about your life and not being afraid of the world or is there something you do to acquire it? Well, the natural immunity that I'm talking about is acquired from getting COVID. So not everybody has sort of natural immunity. It's not innate. You get the disease and you respond to it. This is how

we discovered vaccines. We discovered that the body responds to a virus. So then we tried to simulate that in vaccines. The first vaccine sort of miracle was the smallpox vaccine. It was actually, they took the vaccine from somebody who had it and gave it to you. And it was, it did have a great deal of risk. About one in 50 people would die from the live vaccine. But the risk of dying from smallpox was one in three. So people lined up by the droves. Even George Washington sent his wife to get vaccinated. But interestingly, George Washington didn't get vaccinated. Why? Because he'd already had smallpox.

He got it in Barbados when he was about 15. All of these knuckleheads talk about a vaccine passport. And when we used to have it with smallpox. And I wouldn't have been for it. But interestingly, even back then, you were exempt from it if you had pox on your face and you could say you had had smallpox. So we understood natural immunity for a long time. This is the first disease where you have people in modern medicine actually denying natural immunity that you acquire from it. And it may not be perfect, but we've also found that the vaccine's not perfect. We've found that people with the vaccine can get it and spread it.

But the one thing I do believe is, I do believe that those who are vaccinated, in all likelihood, do get a less severe case of it if they do catch it. The same way people have gotten it naturally like myself, probably will have a less severe form if you get it again. But, you know, we've been asking some interesting questions of the CDC, and Thomas Massey's been good on this. You know, he basically asked them, if you've had the disease previously, what is the evidence of you spreading it to others? And they said, well, they don't have any evidence because they don't collect the data.

They're collecting no data on an important segment. Maybe 100 million of us have had the disease naturally. They just seem not to care at all what has happened to natural immunity. I mean, they're bureaucrats. They're certainly not going to collect data that undermines their own argument and their own power, even if that data would help free people to make free choices. So I appreciate what Congressman Massey is doing. You and he are the only among the few that understand the Constitution in the Congress. I want to switch gears to that. Was there any debate in the Senate where so many Republicans, I think 19 Republicans, I think 19 Republicans voted with all the Democrats in favor of President Biden's

$1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. Was there any debate that, hey, where's this in the Constitution? Why should we be incurring a trillion and two in debt on top of the trillions we already just incurred? Yeah. And this is the thing that people, I think many Americans realize, but in Washington, they seem to not care at all about is annually we were running about a trillion dollar deficit paying for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, military, all the traditional things we have in our budget, about a trillion dollars short every year. Then we added another trillion in spending for infrastructure. But on top of that, they added $3 trillion last year for COVID money, passing checks out to everyone. In fact, I think

this was one of the big problems with Republicans running in Georgia. They ran this race and they told you that the Democrats were radical, extreme socialists and that we had to stop them. Meanwhile, both candidates down there, the Republicans, were for passing $2,500 checks to everybody. It's like, hmm, which form of socialism are you for? Which one are you against? And so I think they undermined their argument against socialism when they were also for passing out checks. Republicans wanting to pass out free checks to restaurants, you name it, all that stuff continues to go on. But are you and Senator Lee and Congressman Massey the only people who question the constitutionality of this? And is anybody going to question the constitutionality of what the president and Senator Schumer and Speaker Pelosi now want, which is another two and a half trillion for all their social redistribution of wealth? You know, I think it's taken a while for Republicans to galvanize and actually remember that we are supposed to be the party against deficits,

but I think they do know that now. And so the reconciliation package, this next package of social spending or big government socialism that's coming, there won't be any Republicans vote for it on the Senate side. I don't think there'll be any Republicans on the House side. So occasionally when Republicans are in the minority, they tend to remember that they're supposed to be the small government party. When they're in the majority, not so much. And so this is a real problem. It's also why I tell people primaries are incredibly important. And there will be some primaries out there where hopefully there will be some alternatives and there will be some small government Republicans that are out there.

And we tend to look at these. I don't get involved in a lot, but we'll probably try to get involved in maybe five, maybe 10 congressional House seats and see if we can try to get the more libertarian leaning, the more constitutional conservative leaning person to get the nomination. When you make an argument about the constitutionality of the issue at hand on the floor of the Senate, do your fellow senators roll their eyes or do they take these arguments seriously as the Senate once did? As you know, my dad used to always say the least effective argument was either a moral or a constitutional argument. And I think that's still true. Now, we still make these arguments. And I'll give you an example on the FISA, the idea that the Foreign Intelligence Court should be used to examine political candidates or to allow wiretaps of political candidates. I think that's an egregious use of the intelligence apparatus and a very, very dangerous encroachment on a free country to allow the intelligence community to do

this. When I argued this case in front of the FBI director recently, that it was a less than or an extra constitutional type of warrant to allow a FISA warrant to examine an American, particularly an American politician. And he just said, oh, no, no, you're wrong. You know, this is absolutely a constitution. I said, well, we're in the constitution to say there's an exemption to the fourth amendment if you are examining an American citizen for something supposedly done in this country. And I think it's very tangential and weak-linked to say you're associated with a foreign government, because here's the thing. FISA warrants says you have to have probable cause that you're associated with a foreign government. The problem, as you know, is if

someone's running for president, you're going to have a host of people around you who have had foreign policy experience and are familiar with and communicate with foreign leaders on a routine basis. It's crazy to think that we would not have a constitution protect these Americans. See, when you make arguments like that, I'm scratching my head as to why liberal Democrats don't join you. Ron Wyden and those guys who, when they talk about civil liberties, are on the same page as we are with respect to that kind of spying. Interestingly, I forced a vote on saying FISA should only apply to foreigners, which is what it says, Foreign Intelligence Court, and exempt Americans from it. And we'd reserve this document called the Constitution for Americans. Most of the Democrats who have been on my side on many

of these issues, they voted no on this. And their argument was, well, we need a waiver for national security to let the president waive this using of the Constitution for Americans. And I was like, but you realize once you grant presidential waivers, they use them and it becomes a document that doesn't protect us anymore. And the interesting thing about the Constitution, I know you know this because you've written extensively about it, but the interesting thing about even the thing we fear and we say we've got to get those foreigners who are going to attack us, the terrorists, when we've tried them, I think well over 300 in American courts, in public, where they get an attorney, where they have the adversarial process that you talk about, about how we find truth to

the adversarial process. We've convicted almost every one of them in a public court with an attorney, with public facts. So I don't think we need to fear things so much that we, you know, just throw the constitution out the window. Last question. Should we fear or should we be concerned about 100,000 Russian troops suddenly showing up at the border between Russia and the Ukraine? Or is that Putin's business? Well, I wouldn't say that we shouldn't fear it. I'm just not sure what the answer is to it. You know, there's a complicated strife all along Russia's border that's going on where you have many of these countries that were dominated by the previous Soviet Union. So there's many Russian speakers and ethnically Russian people in the eastern part of Ukraine,

but also in the Baltic republics as well. Now, I don't want those countries to be overrun by the Soviet Union. I don't know the easy answer to stopping it. I think if you were in the Ukraine and you were trying to make a decision on this, could there be some local autonomy? I actually think the answer of federalism would be good for Ukraine and others, and that's to give the eastern part of Ukraine more local autonomy, elected government in those local areas. If Russian speakers dominate that

area, allow the mayors and the governors to have more autonomy and try to keep one country. I think if you try to suppress their autonomy and have national sort of more Ukrainian dominance from Kiev, I think what you ended up doing is causing more strife. But it's hard to get people to be convinced that federalism actually would allow people to live together under a single system with different ethnic groups having more autonomy in their region. Senator Paul, it's always a pleasure. Thank you very much for joining us. Thanks, Judge. Good luck on your program. Thank you. All the best.