U.S. Senator Rand Paul made a stop Monday morning at Owensboro Health Regional Hospital. After a few comments about health care, Paul answered questions regarding his views on wanting to repeal the Espionage Act, the FBI search at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, and the latest and more relaxed CDC guidance.
Paul met privately with several Owensboro Health officials and other local dignitaries inside the hospital before addressing the media outside.
In his opening remarks, Paul noted that OH has grown to become one of the biggest employers in western Kentucky.
“We have to figure out how to keep hospitals active and profitable and a big part of communities,” he said. “Being a big employer is great, but it only works so much as the hospital is able to still make its way and pay its employees.”
Paul said it’s a difficult time, with more and more people getting health care due to an aging population.
“One of the things that people are worried about is rising prices,” Paul said. “Some of that’s inflation, but some of it we’ve been worried about for some time with drug prices rising. I think one of the answers is letting people join into like a cooperative to get lower prices. If we would legalize the ability for people to join like Sam’s Club or Costco where they’d be part of a large buying group, we can pin down prices and I think there is opportunity for that. I think it’s important that drugs are protected by patents, but I think ultimately there’s been some abuse where the patent goes on longer and longer, and the consumer suffers.”
Paul also answered the following questions:
Over the weekend you mentioned that the Espionage Act should be repealed. Is that just because of the news recently in regards to the search on Mar-a-Lago? Why is this a natural affront to the First Amendment, as you mentioned on Twitter over the weekend?
People have been debating the Espionage Act for 100 years, and the abuses of it. This is a longstanding libertarian argument that has been made. In World War One what happened is thousands of Americans were rounded up for their opposition to the war. There were several socialists that were opposed to the war at the time; Eugene Debs was the most famous. While I have no sympathy for socialism and no sympathy for socialists, I am sympathetic to freedom of speech no matter what your point of view is. He was actually put in prison for life under the Espionage Act.
We have had dissenters in our country. We have had people who have been whistleblowers. Probably the most well-known whistleblower we have is Edward Snowden. By his leaking information, he showed the American public that the government was breaking the law, that they were retrieving all of our information. And so for a long time, I’ve thought that the Espionage Act is something that can be used to stifle dissent and freedom of speech, and therefore, that’s why I oppose it.
What’s your take on your challenger [Charles Booker] kind of defending the Espionage Act and suggesting that you’re not being loyal to your country for proposing its repeal?
Kind of ironic that he is socialist and supported by the Democratic Socialists of America. He’s been very much interacting with the socialist wing of the party throughout his brief tenure. But the thing is, is that this is to defend people like him who are minority voices. For example, he’s a big advocate of defunding the police. I think he has every right to say that. Someone, because of their unorthodox or minority point of view like defending the police, shouldn’t be treated as a traitor to their country. So it’s really something that if people were thoughtful about this, is to defend people with unusual ideas like his from persecution. I think we should have an intelligent discussion over this overtime.
Last week, the CDC kind of revoked some guidelines — testing, track and trace, and discriminating against people based on vaccine status. Have you seen those changes, and do you have any thoughts on them?
… We should acknowledge basic science. In 2006, Fauci actually acknowledged it. He said a mother said, ‘my son has had the flu, should I give him the flu shot?’ And he said, ‘no, the best inoculation for the flu is having had the flu.’ We’ve always understood the immunity of having had a disease to be protective. So it surprises me that it’s taken this long.
I don’t think that we should be continuing to differentiate between vaccinated and unvaccinated. We should encourage people if they’re sick to get treatment. I don’t think there’s a reason to continue to test people who aren’t sick. You know, we’re spending billions and billions of dollars testing people who aren’t sick. So I think we need to acknowledge that this now is a disease that’s endemic to the public; 97-98% of us have immunity either from than the vaccine or from having the disease or both. It’s time that we adapt to it and not continue to treat it as something where we’re going to abuse civil liberties, and something where we’re going to not be paying attention to the immunity that people have from having had the disease.
Any thoughts on the raid last week at Mar-a-Lago, and what do you think the FBI was looking for?
I don’t know any of the details of it. I think that when we start using law enforcement or intelligence agencies to go after politicians that there’s a problem. For example, in the initial FBI investigation in 2016, the use was not an American warrant or warrant from an Article III court; it was a warrant from a foreign intelligence court. That doesn’t have the same standard as the Constitution. The Constitution, under the Fourth Amendment, says there must be probable cause that you’ve committed a crime. Initially they use a FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) warrant, which doesn’t require probable cause and doesn’t have Constitutional protections. I think that’s a big mistake.
Never in our history have we used law enforcement at the federal level to go after previous and potential future candidates. I think that’s a mistake. Apparently, they were cooperating with subpoenas and had released records. Before they thought there were more, they should have taken another subpoena back there. I think that we shouldn’t allow politics to be caught up in the way we apply law enforcement. I think it needs to be equally across the board. If it appears that only one side is being targeted, I think people will lose confidence. I don’t want them to lose confidence in law enforcement, because law enforcement is out there to protect us, but it needs to not be politicized.
