Chris Cuomo (2:44)

What's your sense of why more hasn't come out?

Senator Rand Paul (2:48)

You know, I don't really know. I think it also could be that nothing comes out. That, you know, we've, we've, we know most of the people that have been on the planes. We know most of the people have had an association, you know, with Epstein. I don't know that there is going to be any earth shattering or groundbreaking revelation. I really just don't know. I mean, I'm open to hearing it and I support the transparency. That's as much as I know.

Chris Cuomo (3:12)

Are you worried that the transparency won't land that way? That people are so convinced they're smoking guns in there on either side that they'll never be satisfied and this makes it worse?

Senator Rand Paul (3:24)

Yeah, I think that that's true of a lot of things in government. I think people will become more distrustful of government on many fronts. Say, you know, I would put the hesitancy on vaccines on the same par that people are more and more disbelieving what their government tells them because the government hasn't been honest on a few simple things.

Chris Cuomo (3:43)

You've been in the senate now over 10 years. What's changed?

Senator Rand Paul (3:50)

The, the debt's gotten a lot greater. The interest on the debt has gotten greater. The problems we have are, are bigger. I think there's actually less resistance to big government and to that. Now some of that is, and this is one of my biggest disappointments now is that when you have a Republican in the White House, people tend to want to support the team. It's shirts and skins. We're going to support our guy. But they become less fiscally responsible in the process. You know, last year you remember when you remember this presidential election, Biden inflation, Biden spendings, Biden economics. But the Biden spending levels that many conservative Republicans were against, they're now for. And then topsy turvy. The Democrats were all for the Biden spending levels, but now they're Republican spending levels. They're identical. And the Democrats were opposed. The disappointing thing is that people are voting based on shirts and skins, but not on the debt being a problem. Whether you're a Republican or Democrat, the debt is a problem.

Chris Cuomo (4:52)

Senator, I'm watching the shutdown negotiation as it winds down. Senator Rand Paul says, hold on a second. We have to be aware of what's happening with Hemp it is immediately dismissed. Rand Paul is making a stunt. Rand Paul, this. What, hemp? This is silly. What did you make of that moment and why you chose it?

Senator Rand Paul (5:15)

Well, it's funny because a lot of people think I chose the moment. I didn't choose the moment. I didn't put the provision banning hemp products into the bill. And so a lot of people, this is a very common response online. They're like, why would you choose to do this now? The government needs to be open. And I agree, I want the government open. But it's my job to debate things when they come to the floor. So Mitch McConnell stuck this provision in after I had it removed in the summer. I objected. They needed my consent to move forward quickly, so they left it out of the bill. They airdropped it back in. So you remember all this talk of, we need a clean cr, no policy, we're just going to open government, a clean cr. But what they put in there on language, on hemp completely overturns about 25 states that already have their own rules. Like my state. I live in a conservative Republican state, but we regulate hemp. And we decided that you can have a hemp drink with 5mg of THC in it. And that's what our law is. But McConnell's law is now going to overturn Kentucky law. It's one of the most insulting slaps in the face. And it's also this primitive notion that bourbon is fine, but, you know, THC is wrong. But then we also had cannabis state senators voting against it because the cannabis industry saw it as competition. So alcohol saw it as competition, cannabis saw it as competition. And then people from the stone Age, like McConnell, who saw Reefer Madness in 1925 live at the matinee, are still thinking, the world's going to the devil. We are going to all die if the reefer madness is exploded. And. And really, it's. It's a lot more complicated than that. I had people come up to me on the floor of the Senate, and they said, well, my. My mom takes a gummy to sleep at night. And it's like, who am I to tell somebody's mom or grandma or themselves that has trouble sleeping? Half of America has trouble sleeping. Who am I to say, oh, you can take Ambien, you can take Percocet, you can take whatever legal heroin the pharma. Pharma pharmaceutical companies will sell you, but you can't take a gummy with a little bit of thc it from a plant. So I Don't know. I'm disappointed in it. But it's a big industry. It's a 25 billion dollar industry is going to be wiped out. And there's a lot of the people who use these products that are mad now. And I tell them, call Mitch McConnell and frankly, call some of the Democrats that voted to ban it, too. It was a. I don't know. I'm not done fighting on it. And we're going to see if we can get it reversed.

Chris Cuomo (7:48)

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Chris Cuomo (10:40)

Well, I'm not surprised you're hearing because I have to tell you, you. I have had a lot of people reach out because they know I'm open that using hemp derived thc. Why do I use hemp instead of marijuana? Because it's not a psychotropic drug. It doesn't give me. I don't need a trip. My life and my work is enough of a trip, Senator. You know, I don't need anything. Fantasy, reality is scary enough, but it has helped me not need alcohol or use alcohol for relaxation. It works for me, it works for my joints. And I've had so many people with pain maladies, with psychological maladies, with real disease, that they use the hemp for symptomatic relief. And it seems like all those people got a middle finger from this cabal that got together just to preference alcohol and weed against their interests.

Senator Rand Paul (11:32)

Yeah, and it's, you're right, it's been a movement now I have friends, there are many people I know, they're trying to have less alcohol. And like I say, look, while I'm an advocate, I've actually never tried it. I, you know, it's not a big deal, but I just, just don't, I don't use hemp products. Buy him for freedom. And it's, it always reminds me, and this is one of the most stark things I've ever seen in politics. Remember when Romney got the nomination and a, a young man came up in a wheelchair with ms, and he was going to all the debates and he looked at Mitt Romney and he said, would you deny me the right to use medical marijuana for my ms? And Romney looked right at him and said, yep. And, but the, the, the callousness of that, you know, the uncaring callousness, presumption that you know what's best. And somehow a pharmaceutical company that makes billions of dollars, their product is okay, but it's not okay to have marijuana or THC for this. And really, frankly, it's just none of your damn business. It's. We are adults. I'm fine with the rules keeping it out of kids hands, but by making it illegal, you'll actually drive it back into the hands of kids because It'll go back to the black market. And guess what? When you buy things from a drug dealer around the corner, they don't check your id. When you go to the store, they'll check your id. So legal things are actually much better controlled than illegal things.

Chris Cuomo (12:51)

Yeah, we saw that with Prohibition.

Senator Rand Paul (12:53)

Right.

Chris Cuomo (12:53)

And, you know, it becomes a taboo and you have a secondary market. And also, I mean, look, you're going to take this away? Where are kids going to go? They're going to go back to alcohol. Right? We've seen a reduction in underage drinking. This cannot help with that. And I don't know, the last time I heard of a DUI for hemp, you know, or anybody getting hurt because of hemp or being addicted, addicted to hemp. And certainly alcohol is one of the substances that kills more people than just about anything else in our society.

Senator Rand Paul (13:25)

Yeah, it was kind of lame to hear some of these people from the alcohol industry that were lobbying against it. But to have the alcohol industry sit around a big table with me and they sound like mad that they would ban alcohol, but they just want to ban hemp, but they're still fine with alcohol. The hypocrisy of it is, you know, comes in bounds.

Chris Cuomo (13:46)

Do you think you have any chance of getting this removed from becoming law?

Senator Rand Paul (13:52)

We're talking with the people who are in the industry that are going to lose their jobs. My initial idea, and this is, I'm going to present next week, I'll put in as a bill, is to say that if you have. If your state has already passed a framework for hemp, that that supersedes the federal law. Now, traditionally, if the courts interpret it, federal law trumps state law. But if you write a federal law that says specifically that this federal law trumps your other federal law, if you have a state regulatory framework, that might work and actually would be an impetus for states that want to have hemp to go ahead and regulate it and ban it from kids under 21 and have some rules. And there frankly need to be some rules. And, you know, for example, you can't go to the store and buy a gummy that has 5 milligrams of THC in it and it has 100 milligrams in it. That's fraud. And it's also a crime because you're endangering somebody by selling them something that isn't what it says it is. And we have laws against it already. But you can put that in a regulatory framework. You can decide about how much is a reasonable amount in A package. And these are things a lot of the states were already doing. But the irony of it is, is the states that had limitations, you can't buy it under 21. All of that's being superseded by federal law that doesn't do anything on a just sort of bans the product, but doesn't do anything about the age limits.

Chris Cuomo (15:10)

How much power is there in terms of the membership in favor of banning hemp? Do you think it's something they just went along with Mitch because it was convenient in the moment and whoever was motivating him was motivating it. But it's not that widespread.

Senator Rand Paul (15:24)

I think it's like a lot of issues in Washington. I think there were special interests involved that lobbied him. But it's also like a lot of interest that if we were to poll this issue in Kentucky, I'm guessing 60% of the people would say that's your decision to make. If you're an adult, you can do what you choose. And I think that's what a poll would show. So representative government is good in some ways in that it slows democracy down. Democracy doesn't go like a runaway train. Too much right or left and representative democracy is helpful, but sometimes it, it slows the will of the people and sometimes like a decade's worth. Like I would say the idea of marijuana being legal now in like 20 some odd states, I would say it took probably 15 years after the public had already decided they were okay with this to have it become law. Because it takes a while to. People in the legislature last a while and they last sometimes beyond where the public opinion is. And they're maybe a different set of the public than actually is the current set of the public.

Chris Cuomo (16:27)

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Chris Cuomo (19:10)

So what does that mean to you in terms of your personal mission? I was a avid reader of a lot of your father's writings and political philosophy and I remember when you came in 202011 and you had a very specific personal mandate as a doctor and as someone who believes in individual freedom and fighting against the state and encroachment. How do you feel about the mission? 14 years in, do you believe that you can still do what you wanted to do in government, or has the game changed?

Senator Rand Paul (19:47)

I think the arguments are just as important or more important. So for example, if you ask me what one of the most important things that I debate debate it would be whether or not to send your kids or my kids or somebody's kids to war. There is probably no more important debate. If I'm not here, there aren't many people that will argue that most wars of aggression or most wars, offensive wars, shouldn't be fought, that we should fight when we're attacked, that Congress should vote. People like, oh, Congress is so feckless. And I always remind them that when we have been attacked, we've been Fairly unified. After 9 11, the vote was 434 to 1. I think it was 99 to 0 in the Senate when we were attacked at Pearl harbor. The same way, nearly unanimous. When we've been less unanimous has really been wars we might have avoided. You know, the Iraq War, for one. You know, the vote was much closer. The intelligence was in many ways fabricated or exaggerated. And it was just a war we just had no reason to be involved with. And it took our eye off of what was going on in Afghanistan, et cetera. But I think if I'm not here to debate those things, so I still consider that I'm doing something that I think is important. One of the lines that I have added to virtually every foreign relations bill that comes through is nothing in this bill is to be construed as a use, as an authorization of use of force. And I add that every time because one day we were here and we flew out to go home and they passed a unanimous consent bill condemning and saying we ought to set up a no fly zone in Libya. This was under President Obama. President Obama then announced a no fly zone. We got involved with military hostilities to get rid of Gaddafi, and yet there'd been no vote. And he pointed to that vote and said, oh, you know, they voted unanimously to let me do this. And so I've tried very hard to be a voice on foreign policy to say, let's, you know, let's reexamine this in a thoughtful way. The idea of blowing up 83 people on boats coming off of Venezuela, we, we don't know their names. We've been presented with no evidence of their crime. We don't know if they're armed. And when we do capture them, we just send them home. There's got to be drugs floating in the water. I would think when you blow up the boat, do we scoop up the drugs, test the drugs? We know that the Coast Guard, when they examine boats off of Miami, one in four boats that they board does not have any drugs on board. Are we really willing to accept the odds of 25% of the boats we're blowing up might not be drug boats? And even if they do have drugs, when did the death penalty summary execution without a trial be the punishment for drugs? That's never been our policy. And yet it probably disturbed me more than almost anything I've heard from this administration when J.D. vance spouted off and said this is the highest and most glorious use of our military. And it's like, what kind of callous, thoughtless person would say something like that?

Chris Cuomo (22:41)

Someone who's driven by personal ambition in a moment of specific harshness where the American people seem open to harshness as strength, which has not really been emblematic of what our ideals are. You know, the Epstein thing, the files have to come out. I don't like the rationales that are being offered up for why. I don't believe it's about the survivors, but that's my opinion. Venezuela not being a topic of discussion when it is being surrounded by a military blockade of all these types of assets. Republicans were against the level of support in Ukraine because it was too much. It didn't serve our interests. And they are silent on what's happening around Venezuela. Except for you. Explain that to me.

Senator Rand Paul (23:28)

People fear that if you're somehow not for this war that you're somehow sympathetic to socialism. You know, I wrote a book, the Case Against Socialism. And in the opening chapter I Describe a young 16 year old girl who's head of a gang and her gang's territory is four dumpsters outside of restaurants. And they were to get the morsels of leftover food from the restaurant. That's how desperate socialism has made them. The average person's lost 30 pounds because socialism doesn't produce enough food for people. It's a terrible economic system. So I'm quite a critic of it, but I'm not in favor of. People say, well, why not take them out? And it's like, well, the guy next door is kind of lean socialist too. Petro, should we take him out too? And he's now been critical of Trump. Is he next? Next? And it's like, you know, South America at any point in time has two or three socialists that are in charge of countries. Is it our job to replace them? And what chaos comes from that? And you know, it might be it happens and then the Democratic government takes over and everything swell. Or it might be we have civil war, you know, that, you know, we have to send troops down there. And 5,000 of our, you know, 10 years later, all of a sudden we have lost 5,000 more soldiers, you know, like we did in Iraq. So we get around a lot of these problems by going to Congress first and not letting presidents do it. But there is no resistance on the Republican side. They are, they Are afraid. They are. They are frightened to cross him. And he's become more involved in primaries than any president ever has. And they're. They're just afraid. Even the ones who have a correct instinct are afraid to say anything.

Chris Cuomo (25:06)

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Chris Cuomo (27:47)

Last question for you, Senator, and thank you. Thank you so much for the time and opportunity. You're always welcome here, wherever I am. The pushback against socialism is, you know, they're different forms. Germany is democratic socialism. They're doing great. It's a democracy, but they provide more of a social safety net. They do taxation differently and they're doing very well. So the socialists, when they say that they're socialists, they don't mean Venezuela, they mean Germany.

Senator Rand Paul (28:18)

Yeah, as long as they don't mean the National Socialism of Hitler. Here's the point. The point is, you're right, but most people, and I make this in the case against socialism. We talk a lot about Sweden, not Germany so much, but we talk about the countries that people in America have called socialists. And we try to come to a determination of are they socialist or not. And it turns out when you rank countries for economic freedom, Sweden often ranks ahead of the United States. They aren't a socialist paradise in any way. They don't really have significant price controls. They have private property and they have a private stock market. One of the famous economists of the last century, from a free market point of view, is a guy named Ludwig von Mises. And he wrote that one of the definitions, really, if you're looking for just a basic definition of whether something still has capitalism versus socialism, is that they still remain a stock market where the prices are open and freely fluctuating because those prices send signals to the economy about what to produce. And Sweden, in many ways was actually more free market. They had a lower corporate tax. Their Corporate tax was 20% for the last 30 years. Ours was 35 until 2017. We came down to theirs. They have a social, like the safety net. Yeah, they have lots of welfare. They have like a welfare state. But the interesting thing is they don't do what we do. We have somewhat of welfare state, maybe not quite as generous as Sweden, Sweden's, but we don't tax people for it. We just borrow for ours. In Sweden, they tax the hell out of you. And a lot of the Swedes are kind of fine with. They're used to high taxes and they're used to this, this safety net. But their income tax on 60,000 is about. Is a 60% bracket. So they pay a hell of a lot of taxes. And in the US we have this sort of. It's a, it's a worse situation because both parties kind of want a welfare state, they want a warfare state, but neither one of them really want to pay for it. And so we, we borrow. We're borrowing $2 trillion a year, and it can't go on forever. I think it's going to end badly and there is the potential for crisis, there's increased potential for internal war, the potential for civil war. You know, Ray Dalio is going around talking about a lot of this stuff now and he's. I don't know if he's right about the timing, but I think he and others are right to worry about the chaos that comes. If a currency, particularly the world's reserve currency, if it were to lose value in a sudden fashion, if there were a sudden loss of confidence, what would happen? It would be chaos in the streets.

Chris Cuomo (30:48)

That's why you guys got to focus on crypto. The idea that that's some kind of answer as part of our reserve, it makes funny money look legit. Senator Rand Paul, I appreciate you coming on. You are always an invitation away from being wherever I am to discuss what matters to your constituency and in your opinion, to the country. Thank you.

Senator Rand Paul (31:11)

Thanks for having me.

Chris Cuomo (31:18)

I gotta say, Senator Rand Paul, candid and I believe correct, certainly about hemp. And I suspect he's right about Epstein also in terms of the expectations, why he's going along with it and what is really driving it. What do you think? Let me know so we can get after it. I'm Chris Cuomo. Thank you very much for being part of the Chris Cuomo Project. Checking me out on News Nation at 8pm, 11p every weekday night. You'll be seeing that I have new levels of subscriber that you can be that will get more access, more exclusive things. The products are coming for the free agent line. I am different. Critical thinker, free agent. Why? Because I want to reinforce that you should wear your independence, you should be proud of it, that you're a critical thinker and you're a free agent. You're not paying fealty says stupid party. We're better than that. So thank you very much for subscribing and following and being part of the project. My brothers and sisters. The problems are real. So is our approach. Let's get after it.

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