The Wilderness Read online

  While talking to Woodson one day about their visit to the rehab ministry, Ryan remarked, “You know, I wasn’t always an advocate for prison reform, but after having gone to San Antonio, I changed my mind.”

  Woodson was elated. “Paul actually said that—he said, ‘I changed my mind’!” Woodson later recalled. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard a politician say, ‘I’ve changed my mind’ before. I’m serious.”

  Ryan was experiencing a change of heart as well. When he had first embarked on this project, his good intentions were founded on a carefully considered political calculus designed to rehabilitate his career and his party. But as he continued his monthly excursions into the forgotten cracks and crevices of American society, Ryan became less preoccupied with how bad it looked that his party was so disengaged on issues that mattered to the poor, and increasingly convinced of how bad it actually was: Republicans had failed America’s most vulnerable citizens.

  He regretted that the Romney campaign had written off this suffering swath of the electorate in 2012, but he also recognized that the party’s negligence began well before the last election. “I think that by the time it got around to 2012, it was a little too late,” Ryan told me one day while he was in a particularly reflective mood. “It wasn’t, ‘Oh gosh, four months to go, let’s get this right now!’ It’s not a box checker at the end of a campaign. It’s a consistent and continual thing… It just atrophied in our party. And I was part of that atrophy. I focused on budgets and economics, macroeconomic policy, because that was sort of the crisis in front of us. I think we all, as a party, just fell away from that.”

  The Republicans’ post-2012 soul-searching had yielded many epiphanies of this general variety, and lately earnest proclamations of repentance had become as common in the party’s establishment as the chirping chorus of summertime cicadas in Washington. Among the mainstream fixtures of the GOP—from Bush and Rubio to Ryan and the RNC coroners—the consensus was that the path to the promised land required moderation, compromise, and a renewed commitment to serious-minded governance.

  But the guerrilla freedom fighters of the conservative movement had a different idea—and they were about to make their move.

  PART II

  PROPHETS

  Chapter Six

  The Stand

  Rand Paul had a question for President Obama. An oddly specific, plainly incendiary, deeply weird hypothetical question that probably would have been laughed off by most reasonable adults as silly and paranoid if not for the chilling fact that, so far, no one in the White House was giving him a straight answer.

  The question went like this: does the president believe he has the authority to unilaterally send a military drone to kill an American citizen sitting in a café in San Francisco?

  Rand had first posed a version of this question—along with several other queries about the legality of the U.S. drone program—in a letter to Obama’s nominee for CIA director, John Brennan. Since taking office, the president had dramatically expanded the use of military drones in the Middle East as a ruthlessly efficient weapon to seek out and destroy enemy combatants, while posing minimal risk to the U.S. soldiers who piloted the aircrafts from the safety of stateside military bases. The program had been called into question, however, when it was revealed that the administration had used a drone to assassinate Anwar al-Awlaki, a United States citizen believed to be working as a recruiter for Al-Qaeda in Yemen. While Rand knew his café drone strike hypothetical was provocative, he believed the clandestine al-Awlaki operation raised serious and alarming questions. If the president felt he had the authority to order a military hit job on an American citizen abroad without even the pretense of due process, what was to stop him from doing the same to a target who resided in San Francisco, or Houston—or his own Kentucky hometown of Bowling Green, for that matter?

  Twelve days after sending his letter to Brennan, Rand received a blithe, dismissive note from Attorney General Eric Holder that confirmed all of Rand’s worst suspicions about this arrogant administration and its reckless disregard for civil liberties. “The U.S. government has not carried out drone strikes in the United States and has no intention of doing so,” Holder wrote, before cavalierly dropping in a mushroom cloud–size caveat. “It is possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate… for the president to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States.” But if something like that ever happened, Holder assured Rand, “I would examine the particular facts and circumstances before advising the president on the scope of his authority.”

  He knew what Holder really meant to say: Sit down, shut up, and let the grown-ups handle national security, kid.

  Rand found the response outrageous in its ambiguity: Holder was suggesting that the executive branch had the right to summarily assassinate American citizens on U.S. soil without a jury trial or even an arrest warrant. And yet, the scandalized senator had a hunch that few would take note of this creeping tyranny. After all, he had been interrogating the legality of the drone program for months already—writing little-noticed op-eds, and ranting to half-interested colleagues in Congress—and for the most part, the reaction from official Washington had been radio silence.

  So at 11:47 a.m. on March 6, 2013, the junior senator from Kentucky stood up at his desk on the Senate floor and started to make some noise.

  “I rise today to begin to filibuster John Brennan’s nomination to the CIA,” Rand declared from the well of the Senate, prompting puzzled looks from a few of the lawmakers and reporters in attendance. “I will speak as long as it takes, until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important, that your rights to trial by jury are precious… I don’t rise to oppose John Brennan’s nomination simply for the person. I rise today for the principle.”

  And he was off.

  For all the grandiose trappings of the performance, the filibuster had been a spur-of-the-moment thing. A mischievous What if? tossed out to an aide during his drive to the Capitol just that morning; a stroke of luck that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had left a window open by not ending debate earlier in the day; a last-second impulse to actually go through with it and seize the floor.

  Now, here was Rand—with no plan, no snacks, few notes, and a pair of terribly uncomfortable shoes on his feet—declaring to all the world that he would not sit down until he had made his point.

  But in the ensuing hours, as the filibuster proceeded to draw manic national media coverage—spawning a Twitter hashtag, #StandwithRand, that would become the tagline for the senator’s political rise—it was soon obvious that Rand was doing much more than demanding clarity on a single pet issue. With every sentence he uttered, he was redrawing the battle lines in America’s decadelong, Bush-era debate over national security and civil liberties. Here was a conservative Republican accusing a liberal Democratic president of recklessly abandoning constitutional principle in the name of fighting terrorism—an astounding role reversal from the politics of the recent past.

  The irony wasn’t lost on Rand, who noted early on in the filibuster, “Obama of 2007 would be down here with me.”

  While the script flipping made for great TV, Rand’s high-profile crusade set off a chaotic, off-camera scramble inside his own party. In well-appointed offices across Capitol Hill and in governor’s mansions across America, Republican politicians eyeing 2016 were huddling with advisers, poring over polling data, and obsessively monitoring coverage of the filibuster—struggling to gain their footing in this suddenly shifting landscape. Time was of the essence, and they needed now to make a bet on the new politics of national security: Should they get in on the ground floor of this risky ideological start-up and hope to strike it rich, or pay their dues at the conglomerate of hawkish neoconservatism and patiently climb the ladder?

  Utah senator Mike Lee was the first to make a move. A political outsider who had ridden into Congress on the Tea Party w
ave of 2010, he felt little obligation to toe the party line, or defend the GOP’s win-at-all-costs approach to the War on Terror. As a constitutional lawyer with a libertarian bent, he was well versed in the issues at hand and knew he could bring some firepower to Rand’s fight against executive overreach. (And as long as the executive in question was a Democrat, Lee felt certain his red-state constituents wouldn’t object.) Plus, as one of his aides would later tell me, Lee had long harbored a romantic, little-boy-like fantasy of standing up in the Senate and heroically lending his voice to a righteous filibuster. Watching the spectacle unfold from his office, he felt a pang of urgency. When else would he get this chance?

  At the top of the filibuster’s fourth hour, the Utahn walked onto the Senate floor and asked his colleague from Kentucky to yield for a “question.” Rand consented, and Lee proceeded to deliver a five-thousand-word lecture on the rule of law and the Fourteenth Amendment—a childhood dream come true.

  Ted Cruz was another early ally. The Texan had been sworn in only six weeks earlier, and he had yet to make a speech on the Senate floor. But he knew a Tea Party rainmaker when he saw one, and he had no doubt that this little show would be a hit on the right; he only wished he’d thought of it first. In preparation for his cameo, Cruz asked an aide to print out a list of #StandwithRand tweets that he could read on the floor—nothing too angry or crazy, just general rah-rah stuff. This was Rand’s big night; if Cruz had to hold the pom-poms for a few minutes, he could live with that. But as he reviewed the effusive messages from legions of conservative activists on Twitter, Cruz was struck by just how much appetite there was in the movement for big, gutsy, high-stakes, hashtag-able moments like this one. Something to keep in mind.

  With coverage of the spectacle reaching a fever pitch by hour nine, a parade of conservative House members marched into the gallery to show their silent support, while a number of Rand’s Republican Senate colleagues began joining him on the floor.

  Some of the senators were less fluent in this newly elevated issue than others, and at times the filibuster took on a theater of the absurd quality. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin spent several minutes rambling about Senate dysfunction and the national debt before feebly attempting to get back to the point—a comically bad attempt at improv that drew comparisons on Twitter to Steve Carell’s dunce-like character in Anchorman. (“Senator Johnson has just voted ‘I love lamp,’” tweeted journalist Jeremy Scahill.) Marco Rubio, meanwhile, detailed how Democrats had changed their tune on drones ever since Obama got into the White House, bending some Jay-Z lyrics almost to the point of breaking in the process. “It’s funny what seven days can change,” Rubio said, quoting the rapper. “It was all good just a week ago.”

  At one point, when Rand got hungry, he sent an aide to raid the communal candy drawer that had been kept in the back row of the Senate since the 1960s, and as he spoke, he struggled to keep the sticky gobs of chewed caramel from spilling out of his mouth.

  But the off-kilter moments of weirdness only made the event a bigger media sensation, which in turn increased pressure on other Republicans to join in. Even Mitch McConnell—the Senate Minority Leader who had worked feverishly during the 2010 Kentucky primary to defeat Rand—materialized on the floor before it was over.

  By the time Rand’s bladder forced him to call it quits, just shy of the thirteen-hour mark, there was no question that he had won. His stunt forced the Obama administration to clarify its position on U.S. drone policy. Within hours of the filibuster’s finale, Holder would send a snippy follow-up letter answering the senator’s original question with one word: “No.” What’s more, Rand had successfully cajoled almost every Republican in the Senate into joining his libertarian crusade, at least for the day. And even though Democratic lawmakers had chosen to skip the filibuster and provide partisan cover to the White House instead, Rand’s performance had elicited an outpouring of online support from principled progressives who were alarmed by how Obama was carrying on the terrorist-fighting policies of the previous president. Two American political fringes—the libertarians and the left-wingers—were uniting in common cause, and dragging the entrenched elements of the DC establishment along with them.

  Rand felt triumphant. For once, it didn’t matter what the old-guard goons of Washington thought of him, or his ideas, or his dad. They now had no choice but to recognize him as a powerful new force in the Republican Party—a troublemaker, yes, but one to be reckoned with.

  In the endless loop of filibuster footage that would dominate cable news in the days to come, one scene remained planted in Rand’s memory. He had been standing for about seven hours when he noticed Republican senator Mark Kirk wobbling down the aisle in his direction. Kirk had only recently returned to Washington after suffering a stroke, and even with his cane he almost lost balance on his way to Rand’s desk. When he arrived he set down two objects: an apple and a thermos of hot tea. The gesture was a reference to the 1939 movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, whose idealistic titular character embarks on a filibuster to protest DC corruption. Kirk didn’t say a word. He just tapped two fingers on the top of the thermos and wobbled back out of the chamber.

  The thermos thing really pissed off John McCain. Seriously? We were going to compare this guy to an iconic symbol of commonsense American populism? Give me a break.

  Though he’d mostly tried to ignore the filibuster, McCain had caught portions of Rand’s performance from his office on the Hill—and he was disgusted with the whole affair. This junior senator, Ron Paul’s kid, had been in Washington all of about ten minutes, and he was already deigning to tell people like him—veterans of Congress, veterans of war—that they were wrong about how to keep America safe? The longer it went on and the more he saw his colleagues bow to the media pressure, the more irritated McCain was. Surely Rand meant well. He had his convictions, and that was fine. But with this nonsense about drone attacks and San Francisco cafés, he had concocted a preposterous life-and-death hypothetical scenario—and gotten a bunch of Republicans to pay faddish deference to it—when here in the real world there were serious, real-life threats being levied against America and its interests every day. McCain had no intention of keeping quiet about it.

  The next day, he delivered a rebuttal on the Senate floor, reading from a Wall Street Journal editorial that called Rand’s filibuster a stunt meant to “fire up impressionable libertarian kids in their college dorms.” But he reserved his true feelings for an interview with the Huffington Post later that day. Asked what he thought about Rand and his fellow libertarian-leaning lawmakers, McCain paused for a few seconds, contemplating just how far he should go. “It’s always the wacko birds on [the] right and left that get the media megaphone,” he grumbled, adding that the filibuster had done “a disservice to a lot of Americans by making them believe that somehow they’re in danger from their government. They’re not.”

  When Rand was asked later that day to respond to the “wacko birds” dig, he went with the fail-safe statesman pose that he’d been practicing ever since he got elected: disappointed by his colleague’s discourtesy, saddened by the toxic tone of Washington.

  “You know, I think he’s just on the wrong side of history, and on the wrong side of this argument, really,” Rand told Mike Huckabee in a radio interview. “I treat Senator McCain with respect. I don’t think I always get the same in return.”

  But in truth, Rand was delighted by McCain’s name-calling. He’d had a number of big wins over the past twenty-four hours, from reframing the national debate over drones to unofficially launching his 2016 presidential campaign with a disruptive tsunami of bipartisan support. But driving McCain—smug, self-certain, perpetually wrong Old Man McCain—to such an intemperate outburst of public grumpiness felt so psychically satisfying that it almost trumped everything else. He had just trolled the entire GOP establishment, and they were finally losing their cool.

  He couldn’t wait to do it again.

  When Kristy Ditzler arrived on campus a
t Baylor University in the fall of 1982, she felt as though she had crash-landed on an alien planet. She was a feminist, a liberal, an eighteen-year-old freshman who had been Berkeley-bound until an injury late in her high school career nixed a swimming scholarship at Cal and sent her scrambling to find a new collegiate landing pad. But almost immediately after enrolling at the Waco, Texas, school, she regretted her decision.

  Baylor in the eighties was a deeply conservative place, steeped in devout Baptist culture and old-fashioned gender politics. Coeds were expected to wear skirts to football games; dancing was strictly forbidden; and students of the opposite sex were banned from one another’s dorm rooms at all times, with the exception of closely monitored Sunday afternoon visiting hours, when the doors were to stay open and the God-fearing students were to remain upright and vertical. “I walked into this totally unknown universe where I was being told I was a bad person because I wouldn’t go to Bible study on Thursdays,” Ditzler later told me. Feeling isolated and alone, she almost bailed on the school altogether.

  Then she met Randy Paul.

  Short and lean, with untidy curls sprouting from the top of his head, the sophomore biology student caught Ditzler’s attention with his wry sense of humor and affection for irreverence. They met at swim practice, where Randy and his best friend and teammate, George, spent time in between laps cracking jokes about the school’s pharisaical rules and the sheeplike born-again students who fanatically clung to them. Ditzler was relieved to find a couple of kindred spirits on campus. “They were very different from the typical Baylor students,” she remembered, adding that Randy “saved me from dropping out.”

  George and Randy enjoyed brainstorming creative, absurdist ways to subvert campus culture, and for Ditzler, watching them plot their mischief and mayhem often felt like witnessing a live bullfight: it was fun and frightening and charged with the intoxicating sense that anything could happen. George played the role of matador in these bull sessions, always waving some new stunt or prank he’d concocted in front of Randy to get his attention. It didn’t always work. Randy, the quieter, more studious of the two, was opposed, on principle, to Baylor’s cookie-cutter Christianity and dictatorial administration, but he was not always enthused by silly high jinks.