Opinion: Blacks shouldn't be fooled by Rand Paul

Stephanie Rawlings-Blake is the mayor of Baltimore and the secretary of the Democratic National Committee.

Over the past few months, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has been traveling across the country, speaking to African-Americans in urban communities, pitching himself and the GOP's ideas.

He thinks the GOP's ideas are in our community's best interest, and today he's in Cincinnati to speak at the National Urban League Conference to try his spin out yet again.

While I applaud anyone's efforts to reach out to the black community and share ideas that would improve our families' lives, Paul doesn't understand a very important piece of the puzzle: earning our trust.

For Paul to claim to stand up for our values while opposing policy after policy that advances our community is not the way to do this.

Paul's long and troubled history with civil rights issues is generally well known around Kentucky and in Washington, D.C., but for many Ohioans, it's time to take a closer look.

Discussing the Civil Rights Act, Paul criticized the law, even emphasizing that he believes private businesses should be able to do whatever they want, including discriminate. He explained his opposition by saying, "I think it's a bad business decision to exclude anybody from your restaurant, but, at the same time, I do believe in private ownership."

This view goes against what the Civil Rights Act was put in place to correct, and I thought this law was settled 50 years ago. Apparently, Paul is ready to relitigate our nation's progress on civil rights.

And last year, when the Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act, how did Paul respond? He commented, "We have an African-American president." He also supports voter ID laws that disproportionately impact communities of color and women, saying, "There's nothing wrong with it. … I don't really object to having some rules with how we vote."

Cincinnati – and Ohio more broadly – is ground zero for some of the worst voter suppression efforts in the country. For Paul to come to this city while supporting restrictive voter ID laws is completely backward.

To top it all off, Paul's stock answer for how to improve the economic lot of African-Americans is to implement his questionable plan to establish so-called "Economic Freedom Zones." Just this week, The Enquirer published a lengthy fact-check of Paul's proposal that highlighted how his office claims it would generate $413 million for Cincinnati over the next decade. But one thing was missing: Paul's office refused to explain the formula for how they arrived at that number. They also have no estimates on how much it would cost taxpayers and acknowledge that it's unlikely to become law.

Paul's plan for helping grow the economy in black communities is to promise them the moon while giving no details, no assurances, and providing no evidence that it would actually work – or even happen. And Paul has the gall to challenge those who disagree with him to "come up with their own" plan.

Well, Democrats have a plan. It's called raising the minimum wage and ensuring equal pay for women. It's about properly funding nutrition assistance programs and defending the Affordable Care Act and its protections for those with preexisting conditions and the previously uninsured. And Paul opposes all of these things.

He doesn't understand that African-Americans don't reject Republicans because they have largely ignored black communities for decades or because they don't have enough offices in communities of color. Paul should face the fact that the Republican Party pushes an agenda that slows down – and even flat-out reverses – the progress our community has made.

So as Paul spends time in Cincinnati today, don't let him fool you. To see what he really believes on issues critical to the black community, look no further than the actions he's taken, the agenda he pushes, and the offensive words he used for years before he decided to run for president.