This obscure law may wreck Rand Paul in 2016

Election Day 2014 brought a lot of good news for Republicans, but for one Republican, it wasn’t quite good enough. Rand Paul, the junior senator from Kentucky, had to be disappointed that the Republican sweep didn’t extend to Kentucky’s House of Representatives. For Paul, this means more than partisan disappointment; it may well destroy any chance he has of becoming president.

Rand Paul, the son of libertarian and sometimes Republican, Ron Paul, was elected to the U.S. Senate in the Tea Party victories of 2010. Like his father, a perennial presidential candidate in his own right, the younger Paul seems to have had his eyes set on the White House from his first days in the Senate. He was a founderof the Senate Tea Party caucus and, perhaps following his father’s lead, has emerged as a vocal critic of U.S. foreign policy. He emerged as a political star in March 2013 with a 12 hour filibuster of President Obama’s nomination of John Brennan as CIA director. The filibuster, inspired by Paul’s opposition to President Obama’s use of drones, lasted 12 hours and 52 minutes on a slow news day and catapulted Sen. Paul into the limelight.

The Kentucky problem

The problem for Rand Paul’s presidential aspirations is that he was elected to the Senate in 2010. That means that he will face reelection in 2016 as the country is choosing a successor to Barack Obama. In most states this would not present a problem. For example, 2012 saw sitting Congressman