Rand Paul
Randal Howard Paul is an American politician serving as the junior United States senator from Kentucky since 2011. A member of the Republican Party, he is the chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Paul has described himself as a constitutional conservative and a supporter of the Tea Party movement. His libertarian views have been compared to those of his father, three-time presidential candidate and 12-term U.S. representative from Texas, Ron Paul. Paul attended Baylor University and is a graduate of the Duke University School of Medicine. He was a practicing ophthalmologist in Bowling Green, Kentucky, from 1993 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2010. He was re-elected in 2016 and won a third term in 2022. Paul was a candidate for the Republican nomination in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Early life
Randal Howard Paul was born on January 7, 1963, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Carol and Ron Paul, who is also a politician and physician. The middle child of five, his siblings are Ronald "Ronnie" Paul Jr., Lori Paul Pyeatt, Robert Paul, and Joy Paul LeBlanc.Paul was baptized in the Episcopal Church and identified as a practicing Christian as a teenager.
Despite his father's libertarian views and strong support for individual rights, the novelist Ayn Rand was not the inspiration for his first name. Growing up, he went by "Randy", but his wife shortened it to "Rand".
The Paul family moved to Lake Jackson, Texas, in 1968, where he was raised and where his father began a medical practice and for a period of time was the only obstetrician in Brazoria County.
When Rand was 13, his father Ron Paul was elected to the United States House of Representatives. That same year, Paul attended the 1976 Republican National Convention, where his father headed Ronald Reagan's Texas delegation. The younger Paul spent several summer vacations interning in his father's congressional office. In his teenage years, Paul studied the Austrian economists that his father respected, as well as the writings of Objectivist philosopher Ayn Rand. Paul went to Brazoswood High School and was on the swimming team and played defensive back on the football team.
Paul attended Baylor University from fall 1981 to summer 1984 and was enrolled in the honors program. During the time he spent at Baylor, he completed his pre-med requirements in two and a half years, was involved in the swim team and the Young Conservatives of Texas and was a member of a tongue-in-cheek secret organization, the NoZe Brotherhood, known for its irreverent humor. He regularly contributed to The Baylor Lariat student newspaper. Paul left Baylor without completing his baccalaureate degree, when he was accepted into his father's alma mater, the Duke University School of Medicine, which, at the time, did not require an undergraduate degree for admission to its graduate school. He earned a Doctor of Medicine degree in 1988 and completed his residency in 1993.
Medical career
After completing his residency at Duke University in ophthalmology, Paul moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky, where he has been practicing since 1993. He worked for Downing McPeak Vision Centers for five years. In 1998, he joined a private medical group practice, the Graves Gilbert Clinic, in Bowling Green, for 10 years. In 2008, Paul formed his own private practice across the street from John Downing, his former employer at Downing McPeak. After his election to the U.S. Senate, he merged his practice with Downing's medical practice.Paul has faced two malpractice lawsuits between 1993 and 2010; he was cleared in one case while the other was settled for $50,000. His medical work has been praised by Downing and he has medical privileges at two Bowling Green hospitals. In April 2020, after recovering from COVID-19, Paul began volunteering at a hospital in Bowling Green, assisting them in their response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Kentucky.
Paul specializes in cataract and glaucoma surgeries, LASIK procedures, and corneal transplants. As a member of the Bowling Green Noon Lions Club, Paul founded the Southern Kentucky Lions Eye Clinic in 2009 to help provide eye surgery and exams for those who cannot afford to pay. Paul won the Melvin Jones Fellow Award for Dedicated Humanitarian Services from the Lions Club International Foundation for his work establishing the Southern Kentucky Lions Eye Clinic.
National Board of Ophthalmology
In 1995, Paul was certified to practice by the American Board of Ophthalmology. Three years earlier, the ABO had changed its certification program, which previously awarded lifetime certifications, and required ophthalmologists to recertify every 10 years, while those who had already been given lifetime certification were not required to recertify. Paul felt this was unfair and campaigned to have all ophthalmologists recertify every ten years.In 1999, he incorporated the National Board of Ophthalmology to offer an alternative certification system, at a cost substantially lower than that of the ABO. Board members were Paul, his wife, and his father-in-law. His father-in-law, the board's secretary, stated "I never did go to any meetings... There was really nothing involved. It was more just a title than anything else, for me". By Paul's estimate, about 50 or 60 doctors were certified by the NBO. The NBO was not accepted as an accrediting entity by organizations such as the American Board of Medical Specialties, and its certification was considered invalid by many hospitals and insurance companies. Paul did not file the required paperwork with the Kentucky Secretary of State's office for the NBO's renewal to operate in 2000. He recreated the board in 2005, but it was again dissolved in 2011.
Paul maintained his own ABO certification from 1995 to 2005. Specialty certification does not affect physician licensure, and Paul's medical license has been valid continuously, with no board actions, since June 1993.
Political activism
Paul was head of the local chapter of the Young Conservatives of Texas during his time at Baylor University. In 1984, Paul took a semester off to aid his father's campaign in the Republican primary for the 1984 U.S. Senate election in Texas, which the elder Paul eventually lost to fellow Representative Phil Gramm, who would go on to defeat Democratic nominee Lloyd Doggett in the general election.While attending Duke University School of Medicine, Paul volunteered for his father's presidential campaign.
In response to the breaking of President George H. W. Bush's promise not to raise taxes, Paul founded the North Carolina Taxpayers Union in 1991. In 1994, he founded the anti-tax organization Kentucky Taxpayers United, and was chair of the organization from its inception. He has often cited his involvement with KTU as the foundation of his involvement with state politics. The group examined Kentucky legislators' records on taxation and spending and encouraged politicians to publicly pledge to vote uniformly against tax increases.
Paul managed his father's successful 1996 congressional campaign, in which the elder Paul returned to the House after a twelve-year absence. The elder Paul defeated incumbent Democrat-turned-Republican Greg Laughlin in the Republican primary, despite Laughlin's support from the National Republican Congressional Committee and Republican leaders such as Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush.
The Wall Street Journal reported in 2010 that, although Paul had told a Kentucky television audience as recently as September 2009 that KTU published ratings each year on state legislators' tax positions and that "we've done that for about 15 years", the group had stopped issuing its ratings and report cards after 2002 and had been legally dissolved by the state in 2000 after failing to file registration documents.
Paul spoke on his father's behalf when his father was campaigning for office, including throughout the elder Paul's run in the 2008 presidential election, during which Rand campaigned door-to-door in New Hampshire and spoke in Boston at a fundraising rally for his father on the 234th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party.
In February 2014, Paul joined the Tea Party-affiliated conservative advocacy group FreedomWorks in filing a class action lawsuit charging that the federal government's bulk collection of Americans' phone records metadata is a violation of the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Commenting on the lawsuit at a press conference, Paul said, "I'm not against the National Security Agency, I'm not against spying, I'm not against looking at phone records... I just want you to go to a judge, have an individual's name and a warrant. That's what the Fourth Amendment says." He also said there was no evidence the surveillance of phone metadata had stopped terrorism. Critics, including Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz and Steven Aftergood, the director of the American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy, called the lawsuit a political "stunt". Paul's political campaign organization said that the names of members of the public who went to Paul's websites and signed on as potential class-action participants would be available in the organization's database for future campaign use.
On the announcement of the filing of the lawsuit, Mattie Fein, the spokeswoman for and former wife of attorney Bruce Fein, complained that Fein's intellectual contribution to the lawsuit had been stolen and that he had not been properly paid for his work. Paul's representatives denied the charge, and Fein issued a statement saying that Mattie Fein had not been authorized to speak for him on the matter and that he had in fact been paid for his work on the lawsuit.
Paul is co-author of a book entitled The Tea Party Goes to Washington and also the author of Government Bullies. In 2013 and 2014, Paul was included in a list of the world's 100 most influential people by Time magazine, to which he is a contributor.