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When word got out that Rand Paul was offering a budget amendment to increase the Defense budget by hundreds of billions of dollars over the next two fiscal years, my reaction wasnt so much surprise as curiosity about his excuse. Paul quite rationally recognizes that theres no GOP primary gold to be had in remaining a defense-spending skeptic. But how would he cover up this glaring reversal of position?

Reversal of position doesnt really cover it. Reversal of character, ethos, biography is more like it. Reversal of the whole point of being Rand Paul: representing whatever hesitancy to commit to overseas adventurism exists in the Republican party following the Bush administrations overreach. That flank no longer exists in meaningful numbers, and so now neither does Rand Paul.

Id figured hed go for some sort of truth-in-budgeting play. The fake debate around the Pentagons budget these past two weeks hasnt been between camps that want to restrict the Pentagon and those who want to expand it. Its between sides that all agree the Pentagon should have access to extraordinary sums of cash to do whatever it wants, but disagree about whether those funds should be on the books or in emergency accounts that dont count against budget caps.

He does acknowledge the truth-in-budgeting aspect, meeting only President Obamas more modest OCO request and putting the rest of Defense spending aboveboard. But truth-in-budgeting is not exactly the most rousing political play. Specifically: no one gives a shit about it outside of some DC think tanks.

Pauls main rationale is more of a traditional right-wing budget hawks. His amendment included an additional $212 billion in cuts over the next two years to mostly domestic departments that Republicans dont like as well as the foreign aid budget. (This on top of the slaughtering that these departments will already be taking in Republican appropriations bills.) Heres the annoyingly red-meat way that one of his advisors explains it to Reasons Nick Gillespie:

This amendment is to lay down a marker that if you believe we need more funding for national defense, you should show how you would pay for it. We cant just keep borrowing more money from China to send to Pakistan. And we cant keep paying for even vital things like national defense on a credit card.

Pauls amendment ran the serious risk of being the last straw for many libertarians, who were already peeved at him for getting hot in the belly about destroying ISIS and then for signing Sen. Tom Cottons dumb letter to Iran. So Pauls move for libertarians those who carve out his lane in the GOP presidential primary was also one of offsets: offsetting his betrayal on foreign policy libertarianism by going hard on economic libertarianism.

The problem for Paul with libertarians is that trading foreign policy libertarianism for more better economic libertarianism makes you a generic Republican. Libertarians dont just see over-the-top military spending as something to be traded for cuts elsewhere. They see cutting over-the-top military spending as a major goal in and of itself. As Gillespie writes in that same piece:

Now more than ever, the country needs a strong and unambiguous voice to argue that $600 billion is far more than enough to secure the safety and security of U.S. citizens and interests. If anything, we seriously need to be talking about cutting down the drag thatdebt-financed military spending puts on the economyand, more important, the awful outcomes the past dozen years of U.S. foreign policy has visited not just upon our armed forces but people around the globe. [...]

Its to Rand Pauls immense credit that he, alone among even his Tea Party compatriots who were sent to the Senate to reduce federal spending, wants to pay for any and all increases in defense spending.

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Rand Pauls character problem: How he compromised his entire belief system for politics