Dear goddess, no. Just no.
Senator Rand Paul, who has publicly told America that he does not support the part of the Civil Rights Act that forbids businesses from doing things like preventing African Americans from entering their premises, will be in Detroit on December 6th to open the Republican African American Engagement Office.
Oh, the irony.
Paul told the Louisville Courier-Journal back in 2010 that he thinks excluding black people from your business is “a bad business decision” but shouldn’t be prohibited by federal law. He doubled down on The Rachel Maddow Show and then tried to rewrite his position for which he was awarded “Three Pinocchios” by the Washington Post fact checker.
So, yeah. This is the guy that’s going to help the Republicans rebrand themselves as a party that is friendly to African Americans and he’s going to do it in a city that is 82.7% African American. Good luck with that. By the way, if you’d like to attend, tickets are free but you must pre-register HERE.
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But that’s not all. According the the Detroit Free Press, Paul will also be speaking to the Detroit Economic Club to “unveil his new legislative proposal to remove bankrupt Detroit and other economically blighted areas from poverty and the shackles of big government”. Recall that Paul went on the record to say that a federal bailout of Detroit would happen “over my dead body” even though exactly nobody was asking for that.
According to RandPAC, here’s what Paul’s proposal involves:
The political legacy of tax increases, higher regulation and unsustainable financial decisions have led cities such as Detroit into bankruptcy, and countless other cities into a rut of high unemployment and poverty. Senator Paul plans to unveil a proposal that gets government out of the way and provides new opportunities for prosperity.
There are a lot of opinions about what has caused Detroit’s financial crisis but this is the first time I’ve ever heard anyone say that it was caused, even in part, by tax increases and too much regulation. I shudder to think what sort of free market solution libertarian Rand Paul envisions for our state’s largest city. It brings to mind a dystopia of unfettered corporate dominance that leaves city residents begging for scraps while wealthy individuals and corporations swoop in to pick over the carcass of a city devastated by a catastrophic loss in population and the implosion of its manufacturing base.
This will not go well.
[Rand Paul caricature by DonkeyHotey]
