McConnell Stands With (and Raises Money Off) Rand Paul

After opposing his bid for Kentucky’s Republican Senate nomination in 2010, Senator Mitch McConnell is ready to Stand with Rand, Paul that is. Oh, and he’d like you to join Team Mitch while you’re at it.

In a fund-raising e-mail from Team Mitch, Mr. McConnell’s 2014 re-election campaign, the Republican leader showered praise on Mr. Paul, the junior senator from Kentucky, for his 13-hour filibuster last week of President Obama’s nominee to head the Central Intelligence Agency, John O. Brennan. Mr. McConnell, of course, had to slip in his own role in helping Mr. Paul through the ordeal, a brief appearance in the guise of an extended question that gave his fellow Kentuckian a break.

“After a busy night, I checked CSPAN around 10 p.m. to see a fatigued but determined Senator Paul continuing to fight his heart out on the floor. My staff, who had been in constant contact with Sen. Paul’s staff, told me they were focused on speaking past midnight, which was still two hours away. I wanted to help,” Mr. McConnell wrote in the fund-raising e-mail. “So, at 10:30 p.m., I came back to the Capitol to do what I am asking you to do today: I came back to Stand with Rand.”

In addition, he slipped in, “I hope you’ll help Team Mitch today.”

For Mr. McConnell, the embrace of! his junior partner is a reversal on two fronts: politics and policy. Mr. McConnell in 2010 had backed Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson in his battle against a political neophyte ophthalmologist and Tea Party favorite, Mr. Paul. In the last days of the campaign, Mr. Paul refused to say whether he would back Mr. McConnell as Republican leader in the next Senate. Mr. Paul trounced Mr. McConnell’s candidate.

On the policy front, Mr. McConnell has hardly showed Mr. Paul’s concerns for the due-process rights of suspected terrorists. Mr. Paul mounted the filibuster to demand a more explicit statement from the Obama administrationrenouncing the authority to use armed drones against U.S. citizens, especially on American soil.

But in the running battles between civil libertarians and the Bush White House over similar matters, detainee rights, Guantanamo Bay, warrantless wiretapping, Mr. McConnell stood on the side of presidential authority. On the Bush administration’s use of wiretapping without court order, Mr. McConnell said in 2006, “The overwhelming majority of the American people understand that we need new techniques in the wake of 9/11 in order to protect us. The president feels very, very strongly that he’s acted constitutionally.”

“If you are calling from Tora Bora, you are probably not calling to order a pizza,” he’d later quip, referring to the Afghan redoubt where Osama bin Laden slipped from the grasp of the U.S.! military! in the early months of the Afghanistan war.

But if Democrats worried back then about a slippery slope toward infringement of civil liberties, Mr. McConnell now appears convinced of a cascade toward totalitarianism.

“This battle is so important because the Obama administration and their allies in Congress are out for total control,” the fund-raising e-mail said, “total control of your money, total control of your liberty, total control of your health care, total control of Washington.”

And in standing with Rand, Mr. McConnell is hoping for total control of his right flank â€" so he does not become Kentucky’s next Trey Grayson, an establishment Republican pushed to the side by a hard-charging Kentucky Tea Party patriot.