Rand Paul pledges to block John Bolton nomination: 'I'm an automatic no'

published 11 December 2016

President-elect Donald Trump can expect forceful opposition from within his own party if he nominates former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton to be deputy secretary of state under Rex Tillerson, as Trump is believed to be planning. Speaking with ABC News on Sunday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) leveled an unflinching critique at Bolton's hardline neoconservative polices.

"I don't know about Tillerson," Paul said, "but I do know that John Bolton doesn't get it. He still believes in regime change. He's still a big cheerleader for the Iraq War." If Trump indeed picks Bolton for the deputy position, "I'm an automatic no," Paul continued. "He should get nowhere close to the State Department, if anybody with a sane worldview is in charge."

Paul paired the interview with a tweet pledging to "work to defeat [Bolton's] nomination to any post." In 2013, the Kentucky senator filibustered an Obama nomination for 13 hours to protest the president's drone strike policy.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.