My Congressman

Many Americans, particularly younger ones, don't care to know the first thing about their Congressperson. There are lots of reasons not to care about one's congressional representative. Some in Texas feel that their district is so uncompetetive that their opinion and vote would make no difference in the next election. For many college students or people recently graduated from college, like myself, apathy towards a representative might stem from the fact that they may never be moving back to their hometown, and even if they did, they might be far more concerned with national or state-wide issues than with how their own unimportant suburban district is doing. Prior to meeting my Congressman, Ron Paul, I really only knew of two congresspeople in the Houston Area. One was Sheila Jackson-Lee, who for some reason is always engaged on national issues concerning Indian-Americans or American foreign relations with India and Pakistan. The other was Tom Delay, whose interestingly shaped district covers Sugarland in West Houston and magically curves around all the way to a town called Nassau Bay next to my own town on the southern side of Greater Houston. I found this out last year at Nassau Bay's fourth of July parade. I often go to the town, where some of my best friends live, to drink beer on the fourth of july and watch their small-town parade and small-town fireworks. During last year's Fourth of July celebration, I was surprised when one of the floats was a flashy red convertible with none other than Tom Delay standing in the back throwing out pieces of candy to the kids (i warned them to not eat any) and passing out little hand-held fans that said "I'm a Tom Delay Fan!" on them. This is true. I have the fan still.

However, I met a third Congressman from the Houston area this summer. His name is Ron Paul and he is the Republican Congressman from Texas's fourteenth district, which includes my hometown suburb, League City. He came to the grand opening of my dad's new clinic, handed out several copies of the U.S. Constitution with a special prologue that he authored, discussed some medical issues since he used to be a practicing doctor himself, and we all had a big photo-op at the end.

During his visit, while staff at the clinic urged him to support various initiatives regarding medical issues, I heard him make several cutting remarks to the tune of "Well, perhaps if we weren't spending so much abroad on wars and such, we'd be able to do things here." I remember thinking that, for a Republican, he seemed pretty agitated towards the Bush administration's foreign policy, and this made me like him. After he left, I took a glance at the constitution he gave me, and grew frightened by the prologue. I wish I still had a copy I could quote, but I don't. Basically, however, his introduction to the constitution had some incredibly harsh words for U.S. government in general and mentioned something about wanting to abolish several components of our government, including the I.R.S. I threw down the book before it bit me and immediately dismissed Paul as a crackpot worthy of being interviewed on Stephen Colbert's "Get to Know a District" segment.

Since then, however, I've read a bit more about him, and I've found out that, if nothing else, he is one of the most interesting and consistent people in Congress. He is a libertarian, which explains why he wants to use government to abolish government. In fact, he once won the Libertarian nomination to run for United States President and came in third after George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, albeit with 0.5% of the popular vote.

Besides wanting to get rid of the IRS, Paul also wants to do away with the FDA, the Federal Reserve (and go back to the gold standard), the Department of Education, the CIA, Drug Laws, and most any kind of government intervention. According to this article about him in the Washington Post that I came across, Ron Paul didn't want to give congressional gold medals to Mother Teresa, Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, or Rosa Parks, because that would cost the taxpayers the price of minting the gold. He suggested instead that house members contribute money from their own pocket to create those medals. He also voted against sending money to victims of Hurricane Katrina, saying:

Is bailing out people that chose to live on the coastline a proper function of the federal government?...Why do people in Arizona have to be robbed in order to support the people on the coast?

Wow! Those are some libertarian views, alright. In terms of foreign policy, he describes his views as 'non-interventionist', meaning that he not only opposes the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he also is against any kind of intervention anywhere, any time, for any reason. He is against giving any foreign aid, and he doesn't even like to issue national statements taking a 'side' in a foreign conflict, as he believes that can cause us to get involved later on, as evidenced in this speech against the Israel Resolution.

The Washington Post is critical of his harking back to a golden age of the days before Income Tax or Social Security prior to 1935, about which he said "Prices were low and the country was productive and families took care of themselves and churches built hospitals and there was no starvation." The Post quotes Michael Katz, a historian of poverty who pretty much blows those assertions out of the water, which isn't hard to do considering the Great Depression: "Where to begin with this one?...The stories just break your heart, the kind of suffering people endured..."

But, despite the fact that the Post is critical of him, and despite the fact that I don't like his libertarian ideas one bit (I think that some libertarians deal with their mistrust of the government in the wrong way - instead of attempting to improve it and make it more transparent and accountable, they seek to tear it down completely), I'm pretty impressed with just how consistent and true-to-his-values Paul remains at a time when everyone seems to be in one of only two camps.