His fanbase is among some of the strangest.I kept on hearing variants of "I voted for Obama in 2008 but would love to vote Ron Paul 2012".
That's his big problem. For example, on the problem of health care affordability, he had a very interesting suggestion. Change the income tax deduction for medical expenses to an income tax credit. This was a shockingly progressive/left-wing suggestion. It is essentially proposing that, at least for people with income tax, that the government pays for your health care up to the amount of your income tax. Most people would still need to buy insurance, but they could get by with a high deductible policy to cover catastrophic situations. For most of their health care, the tax credit would be enough.
And in the same speech to Congress where he tossed out that idea, he blamed the high costs of health care on our focus on science-based medicine. We need, according to Paul, to make it easier for homeopaths and other quacks to practice, so the competition can drive the cost down.
From there, Supreme Court precedent told the states they couldn't keep blacks from voting, couldn't segregate them, couldn't ban interracial marriage, etc. Every time the states tried to oppress this or that group, they put their sovereignty on the line and the Supreme Court took some of it away. Consider when the governor of Alabama, George Wallace, took a stand against federal court ordered desegregation of the University of Alabama. President LBJ sent federal troops down to Alabama to enforce integration. From a state autonomy standpoint, it was a huge blow, as the federal government asserted its supremacy. The governor of Alabama was forced to step aside on the property of a state university as National Guardsmen escorted black students inside against his will and that of Alabama voters: http://partners.nytimes.com/library/national/race/061263race.... This continued through the 1960's and 1970's. The state courts were put in their place when the federal courts started aggressively supervising their procedures, to deal with their tendency to fail to give fair trials to black defendants.
Federalism is dead because the states pissed away all of their political capital trying to oppress people.
Any thoughts on how effective Kansas' proposed "allowed discrimination of gays" for private business owners will hold up, if enacted? My thought is that, despite there being a ton of bad precedent regarding the Commerce Clause, private business owners should not be required to obey the 10th amendment, just as Facebook isn't obligated to respect my First amendment right, though I find it curious that they put the 10th up against the 1st, such that only those of a "sincerely held faith" may choose to discriminate, as I think it should be allowed for all private business owners.
However... wouldn't it be nice if the Supreme Court ruled that:
1. All of the Constitutional rights must be protected by states & localities as well.
2. The Commerce Clause is legitimate.
And left the rest to the states? No significant Federal control of drug laws, drinking age, blah blah blah...
I would be so happy.
For instance, according to the Supreme Court, the states are bound by the part of the First Amendment that prohibits the establishment of religion or restricting the free exercise of religion.
Paul thinks that establishment of religion or restricting the free exercise of religion should be a state issue. He tried two or three times to introduce federal legislation that would have stripped the federal courts (including the Supreme Court) from hearing cases in this area, which would de facto make that part of the First Amendment no longer apply to state and local government.
He has a similar belief in regard to the privacy rights that the Supreme Court has found implicit in the Constitution. His bills that tried to gut the First also strip federal jurisdiction over any case involving a right of privacy.
If his bill had passed, it would have actually made it legal for states to establish or restrict religions, and it would have brought back into force sodomy laws, bans on birth control, and other such laws that were found Unconstitutional due to violating privacy rights.
Most states, I believe, have prohibitions against establishment of religions, or restrictions on the free exercise of religion, so the damage would be limited in that regard. The first state everyone thinks of is Utah, thinking it would establish Mormanism as the state religion, but Utah is one of the states whose Constitution has a clause similar to the First Amendment. Texas could be a problem. It has a provision in its Constitution that holders of political office must acknowledge the existence of a God, and so in theory an atheist would not be able to legally hold office in Texas if Paul had his way.
Edit: here was one of his bills on this: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.R.958.IH:
Note that HN's URL recognition misses the last character, so you'll need to add it manual, or copy/paste, rather than just clicking.
The counterpoint is typically along the lines of "well since he is in the federal politics game, what he thinks about how states can treat people is irrelevant".
He doesn't provide the offensive soundbytes that the media wants; his points tend to provoke actual thought, which is the like poison to the contemporary American voter.