That is the idea of Saul Anuzis, chairman of the Michigan GOP. And it is just about the worst idea I have heard all month.

Well -- let me be precise. The idea itself is a pretty good one. The problem is the rationale. Reports the AP:

The chairman of the Michigan Republican Party said Wednesday that he will try to bar Ron Paul from future GOP presidential debates because of remarks the Texas congressman made that suggested the Sept. 11 attacks were the fault of U.S. foreign policy.

Yes. It is always a good idea to do what the other party's most hyperbolic leaders accuse you of doing. In this case, it is stifling dissent. That's smart.

In actuality, Ron Paul should indeed be excluded from the debates, but not because he said what he said. That would be politically idiotic.

[Quick digression about his comments on 9/11: Paul was correct insofar as our nation's foreign policy was a causal factor in the attack. But, so also was the Wright brothers' invention of flying a causal factor in the attack. Without airplanes, there would have been no attack! What was objectionable was Paul's implication that our foreign policy made us morally liable as well. There is a subtle difference between moral blame and empirical cause -- the former always implies the latter, but the latter does not always imply the former. In the debate, Paul essentially says "cause" (his phrase is "contributing factor"), but it is pretty clear that he means "blame." Rudy picked up on this subtext, and I think he was right to rebuke him as strongly as he did.]

I think Paul should be excluded because he is only a nominal Republican. He remains in the Republican Party because he caucuses with the GOP in the House and runs as its nominee in Texas' Fourteenth District. If Republican leaders were not so risk averse, I assure you they would do everything they could to remove him in the next election (the last time they tried that was 1998). Paul's seat is a safe seat for the GOP right now. A primary challenge would be messy in that (a) it might induce an internecine war among Republicans in the district (imagine allies of Paul abstaining in the general, or worse working for the Democrats, or even worse Paul winning the fight and then cutting a deal with the Democrats in the 111th Congress), and (b) it might induce a quality Democratic challenger to enter the race. Paul caucuses with the Republican Party, and that first vote every term is worth enough to GOP leaders to tolerate his presence.

But Paul is not really a "libertarian-leaning Republican." He is a libertarian. It is hard to pick up this distinction in these debates. Libertarians and Republicans have seeming similarities in their desires to reduce the size and scope of the federal government. But it would be a mistake to think that the differences are only quantitative. They are also qualitative. It is not simply that Paul would cut more excess than, say, Jeff Flake. It is that Paul, as a libertarian, has a very different view of what excess is. This is what Michael Barone writes in The Almanac of American Politics:

Frequently, his insistence on limited government made Paul the House's lonely dissenter -- against bills to require states to report on their progress in improving student achievement, to award Congressional Gold Medals to Rosa Parks and Pope John Paul II, to pass the Patriot Act after September 11...He was the only Republican to vote "present" on the resolution expressing support for the military forces at the start of the war with Iraq. He supports virtually no role for the U.S. government overseas...

Now, granted, Paul does overlap with the GOP and not with libertarians on several salient issues -- border control and abortion being two major examples. But the man has a fundamentally different view of what the United States government should and should not do. I imagine that, had Paul been in the Senate when Jefferson presented the Louisiana Purchase to it, he would have heartily declared, "Nay! Where in our Constitution does it grant the federal government the authority to purchase land?"

Oddly enough, he appears as a moderate in the National Journal's ratings of House members. His liberal-conservative ratings in 2004 for economic, social and foreign policy were 47-53, 46-54 and 80-20, respectively. He seems to be a moderate, but that is actually an illusion created by NJ's two-dimensional measure. Paul is operating on a third dimension. His politics do not fit into our two-dimensional scheme of liberal/conservative. He is a libertarian.

Again, he's counted as a "Republican" only because the Republican caucus in the House is risk averse and is satisfied to keep him provided that he caucuses with them. His only reliable vote is the first vote of the session. He does not really belong at a Republican debate.

Of course, thanks to Saul Anuzis' comment, he will be guaranteed a spot in the debates henceforth. The GOP is not going to take him out for fear of accusations of "stifling" debate. Actually, he was probably guaranteed a spot, anyway. He's been tossing hanging curve balls for two debates. And now that Rudy has hit one of them out of the park, the rest of the candidates will want him there so that they can have a swing, too.