Rand Paul took the stage in Louisville this month for his presidential campaign kickoff and delivered a thunderous pronouncement to cheering supporters. “We limit the president to two terms. It’s about time we limit the terms of Congress!” he blared.

Back in the U.S. Senate, the idea was quickly dismissed — by Paul’s fellow Republicans.


“Up here, I think if you impose officially short term-limit restrictions, then you just empower the lobby and the staff, and it makes it less representative of the American people,” said Texas Sen. John Cornyn, a three-term veteran and No. 2 in the GOP leadership.

Added seven-term Sen. Orrin Hatch: “I’ve never been for term limits. I actually believe we have a built-in constitutional term limit: And that is the ballot box.”

The skepticism covers more than just term-limit pledges. GOP senators have poured cold water on Paul’s vow to repeal the Patriot Act, with Kelly Ayotte even warning such a move would endanger Americans. Marco Rubio’s promise to reverse President Barack Obama’s effort to normalize relations with Cuba “would not fly,” in the estimation of Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake.

And Ted Cruz’s promise to abolish the IRS “I’ve been hearing that since the Coolidge administration!” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said with a big laugh.

Freed from the need to build coalitions to pass legislation, Paul and fellow GOP senators Cruz and Rubio are unleashing an arsenal of crowd-pleasing conservative proposals along the campaign trail. Some, like calls to abolish entire federal departments, are staples of GOP presidential campaigns going back decades that have never come to fruition. Others are of more recent vintage, such as scrapping the post-9/11 Patriot Act.

The cool reception is a stark reminder of the gulf between presidential campaigns and a Congress designed to frustrate the will of any president. The proposals are being written off as wrongheaded or unrealistic not only by Democrats but by Republicans.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, the folksy Tennessee Republican who ran unsuccessfully for the White House twice, used to propose abolishing the Department of Education and cutting the pay of lawmakers so he could “send them home.”

“That sounded pretty good on the stump so I kept saying it,” Alexander recalled. “You’re going to hear a lot of things in a presidential campaign that appeal to the primary audience that don’t have much chance of making their way into national policy.”

Still, skepticism from fellow Republican senators may, in a way, be beneficial to the GOP candidates — particularly Paul (R-Ky.) and Cruz (R-Texas). Both men are positioning themselves as crusaders against the Washington establishment, casting themselves as outsiders looking to shake up the entrenched interests of both parties. The more skepticism from their party, their supporters say, the more it means it’s time for a fresh face in Washington.

“That’s part of the problem: New ideas are not going to come from within Washington,” said Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho), a supporter of Paul’s. “The new ideas are going to come from the outside. They are going to come with new blood, new people, and people who have been recently in the private sector — not people who have been in Washington, D.C. for a long time.”

In an interview last week, Paul said his ideas are resonating among voters and signaled he’s ready to push back against criticism from his fellow colleagues. In particular, he said, repealing the Patriot Act — and cracking down on the National Security Agency’s bulk data collection program on phone calls — enjoys wide support among voters.

“The NSA spying program — up here — a majority of people support it,” Paul said, referring to Capitol Hill. “I think if you ask the American public, ‘Should the government be collecting all your records all the time without a warrant — with your name on it I think most people in America agree with me.”

Ayotte, the New Hampshire who sits on the Armed Services Committee, doesn’t agree.

“We have to deal with the reality that the terrorism threat is real, it’s growing, it’s morphing,” Ayotte said. “I don’t think eliminating this type of program is the right direction for us to go right now.”

Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt, a Republican on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said: “We need to have that program.”

“It might not be legislative reality [to repeal the Patriot Act], but they are more than campaign ideas because they show up at my town meetings,” said Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee.

On the campaign trail, Cruz is trying to distinguish himself as the kind of conservative who won’t yield to pressure to compromise and will force his foes in Washington to cater to his whims. Getting rid of the hated tax-collecting agency is just one way to do that.

“Imagine abolishing the IRS!” said Cruz, who wants to replace the sprawling Tax Code with a flat tax where Americans can pay their taxes on a document no larger than a postcard.

Hatch, who chairs the tax-writing Finance Committee, said he had a good chuckle recently when discussing the idea of eliminating the agency.

“I just told IRS commissioner, ‘I can’t wait to abolish the IRS,’” Hatch said. “And he was laughing along with me.”

Cruz’s fellow Texas Republican, Cornyn, said: “I’m for that!” when asked about the idea to abolish the IRS. Asked if it could actually happen in Congress, “You gotta capture people’s imagination – and I think that’s what a lot of campaigning is about. And then you gotta get to the hard work of actually governing, which is sometimes a little different.”

Catherine Frazier, a spokeswoman for Cruz, said her boss “remains committed to his effort to abolish the IRS” and would propose a tax overhaul plan later this year that “will help make it a reality.”

To Republican skeptics, such lofty rhetoric reminds them of the current White House occupant and what came of his 2008 platform of hope and change.

As a fresh-faced Illinois senator, Obama pledged to transcend partisanship with vows to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, reform immigration laws, eliminate corporate tax loopholes and enact a cap-and-trade bill to control global warming. The promises hit a brick wall in Congress, disappointing many of Obama’s most ardent supporters and causing his approval ratings to crater.

Some flatly warn the GOP presidential class not to do the same thing in 2016.

“After Obama, where he’d say anything — ‘If you like your health care, you can keep it. If you like your doctor, you can keep it’ — we shouldn’t be saying things that are not practical,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who will likely mount a presidential run himself. “After Obama, our party shouldn’t be saying things just because they are nice to hear.”

Flake, the Arizona Republican, said that’s what Rubio appears to be doing when it comes to Cuba. Flake is one of the few outspoken GOP supporters of Obama’s effort to normalize relations with Cuba, putting him on the opposite side of the issue with Rubio. A President Rubio, Flake said, would not be able to undo Obama’s historic move to ease relations with the neighboring nation — even with a GOP Congress — because he believes there would be growing public support for the ability to do business with and travel to Cuba.

“I think if it’s President Rubio, he would be faced with the situation where we have an ambassador, we have normalized relations, and he would have to remove that — take that away,” Flake said. “And I just do not think that would fly.”