Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) vociferously defended Apple during a Senate hearing on Tuesday, as the tech giant fought against accusations that it used foreign subsidiares to dodge billions of dollars in taxes. The Tea Party favorite, who is openly considering a 2016 presidential bid, accused the government of “bullying” Apple and issued a personal apology to its executives.

Apple CEO Tim Cook appeared before a Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations one day after Congressional investigators revealed that Apple avoided paying $2.4 billion in taxes in 2011 alone.

“I’m offended by the spectacle of dragging in Apple executives,” Paul said. “What we need to do is apologize to Apple and compliment them for the job creation they’re doing…Apple hasn’t broken any laws, yet Apple is forced to sit through a show trial,” he said. Watch some highlights:

However, Paul’s decision to stick up for Apple may be motivated by more than tax policy. Like any ambitious politician flirting with a presidential bid, Paul needs money. Lots of it. And, according to the Washington Post, he’s working to charm a fertile source of campaign funds: Silicon Valley. Later this month, Paul will travel to California for a speech at the Reagan Library, followed by meetings with tech executives:

His closest political strategist, Doug Stafford, resigned last week as chief of staff at Paul’s Senate office, moving to head Rand PAC.

Stafford said in an interview that fundraising and other operations are gearing up, both at Rand PAC and at Paul’s 2016 Senate reelection operation. He said the organizations will work aggressively in an area that was not available to the elder Paul, “which is the ability to reach out to high-dollar, traditional fundraising. . . . That’s something that we’ll be focusing on into next year.”

To that end, the senator’s Reagan Library trip will include meetings in Silicon Valley with tech industry executives, some of whom see Paul as an ally because of his opposition to Internet taxation and regulation. Paul aides see the tech industry, which heavily backed Obama’s campaigns, as a potential source of campaign donations for the senator or other Republicans.

Though Paul frequently rails against crony capitalism, there’s more than a bit of hypocrisy in his decision to stick up for a tax-dodging company in order to score more campaign donations.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) went on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday to use the IRS scandal to attack the Obama administraiton, but flubbed a key part of his case: he couldn’t defend the claim that IRS was targeting conservative groups as part of a political strategy to help the White House.

Paul, like most Republicans, has been spinning the scandal as an Obama Administration attack on dissenters. “What the IRS did is how the KGB used to target dissidents,” he wrote in a CNN op-ed. “It is how they deal with troublemakers in China.”

Some have argued the extra IRS scrutiny was part of a failed attempt to implement election law, as opposed to a political crackdown. Host Candy Crowley asked Paul why this interpretation was wrong. He couldn’t give her a reason:

CROWLEY: We do know this one place processes 70,000 applications. Can you see in your mind’s eye a way this might not have been political, that this was a misguided stupid way to sort but that they didn’t intend it to be some kind of political attempt to harass the Tea Party?

PAUL: I would think if there’s any chance that this was a mistake, the Investigator General wouldn’t be coming out and saying otherwise, and the IRS themselves wouldn’t be saying –

CROWLEY: They say it’s a mistake. I think the question is whether it’s political.

PAUL: Well, I think we’re going to have to see the memorandum. Apparently there is a policy, and I think we’re going to find there’s a written policy that says we were targeting people who were opposed to the President. And when that comes forward, we need to know who wrote the policy and who approved the policy…now there’s rumors who wrote the policy is the person running Obamacare, which doesn’t give us a lot of confidence about Obamacare.

CROWLEY: Senator, I have to run. I’m way over on this, but I have to just go back to something you said. Are you telling me you think there’s a memo somewhere in which someone said in the memo we’re targeting people going after the president? Is that what I heard you say?

PAUL: Well, we keep hearing the reports and we have several specifically worded items saying who was being targeted. In fact, one of the bullet points says those who are critical of the President. So I don’t know if that comes from a policy, but that’s what’s being reported in the press.

It’s unclear what Paul’s source for that last claim is, but the Investigator General’s report Paul references found no evidence that conservative groups were targeted as part of a political strategy to weaken the president’s political opponents. The report blamed independent IRS management for allowing the practice to go on in the lower-level Cincinnati office.

Republicans, by contrast, have tended to portray this as part of a concerted Obama Administration strategy to attack conservatives. They have also used the controversy to attack Obamacare.

On Wednesday morning, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) gave an address at the historically-black Howard University designed to convince black voters to support Republicans. While some of his remarks, most notably on harsh drug laws and other civil liberties issues, were well-received, the majority of the speech consisted in Paul condescendingly explaining American racial history to the audience, occasionally incorrectly, and expecting that it would open black voters’ eyes to the real Republican Party. Here are five moments that encapsulated the general problem with Paul’s speech:

1. The Civil Rights movement is actually the “history of the Republican Party”. The thrust of Paul’s speech was a recapitulation of the history of race and racism and a defense of the Republican record on race (representative line: “The story of emancipation, voting rights and citizenship, from Fredrick Douglass until the modern civil rights era, is in fact the history of the Republican Party.”) The problem was that this speech, ostensibly designed to persuade black voters that the GOP was interested in them, was telling the audience things it already knew. Moreover, the speech didn’t grapple with what happened to make the Democrats the more racially liberal party in the mid-40s or the turn towards racially divisive politics on the Republican right, essentially skipping over the real reason the GOP alienated African-American voters.

2. Assumed the audience didn’t know the history of the NAACP. In one of the most awkward moments of the talk, Paul asked the audience if anyone knew that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had been founded by Republicans. The audience responded with a resounding “yes!”

3. Suggested that African-Americans were “demeaning” the history of sergregation by calling voter ID laws discrimination. When asked how African-Americans could trust the Republican Party given its generalized support for discriminatory voter ID laws, Rand Paul told the audience to chill out about the measures, suggesting they were common sense. Paul argued that the view that these laws were an updated version of poll taxes was “[demeaning] the horror” of segregation. NAACP President Benjamin Jealous has said voter ID laws are “pushing more voters out of the ballot box than any point since Jim Crow.”

4. Mangled the name of the first popularly-elected black Senator. In what appeared to be an attempt to demonstrate his familiarity with the subject matter, Paul brought up Senator Edward William Brooke III (a Republican mentioned in the prepared remarks as “the first [elected] black U.S. Senator”). He referred to him, however, as “Edwin Brooks,” a point the audience corrected.

5. Misled about his opposition to the Civil Rights Act. Paul said “I’ve never wavered in my support for civil rights or the Civil Rights Act.” The problem, as Mother Jones‘ Adam Serwer pointed out, is that he opposed the law’s ban on discrimination in “places of public accommodation” like businesses, one of its most important planks. As an audience member asking Paul about this issue pointed out, “this was on tape.”

If Paul wants to spearhead Republican overtures to African-Americans, he’s got his work cut out for him. Over 50 percent of black voters in the last election believed Republicans “don’t care at all about civil rights,” while 71 percent thought Democrats were doing strong work in the area. President Obama won 93 percent of black voters.

Thirteen Republican senators have pledged to filibuster a senate debate about new gun safety measures, insisting in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) that they will “oppose any legislation that would infringe on the American people’s constitutional right to bear arms, or their ability to exercise this right without being subjected to government surveillance.” The threat, which Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY), Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mike Lee (R-UT) first made last week without seeing the bill, comes just days before the body prepares to consider the first comprehensive gun legislation in the aftermath of the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. The package will expand restrictions against gun trafficking, invest in school safety and provide for universal background checks of all gun purchases.

But one top Republican, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), is speaking out publicly against the group, questioning the wisdom of promising to filibuster legislation that lawmakers have yet to finalize:

After Mr. Coburn was asked multiple times an identically worded question about whether he would join Mr. Paul’s effort to block gun legislation as he traveled around Oklahoma in recent days, Mr. Coburn bristled at the idea that Mr. Paul would threaten to filibuster a bill before its contents were made final.

“Is that about filibustering a bill to protect the Second Amendment, or is that about Rand Paul?” Mr. Coburn said at a town-hall meeting at the Oklahoma Sports Museum in Guthrie, Okla., on Wednesday. “I’ve done more filibusters than Rand Paul is old,” Mr. Coburn said, but he added that he doesn’t announce such moves before he understands the bill.

Coburn is working on compromise legislation that would expand background checks to all gun purchases, but would not require private sellers to keep a record of the transaction, which gun safety advocates say would ensure that checks are being properly conducted and allow the entire chain of custody to be reconstructed in the event the gun is later recovered in a crime.

Should the Republicans proceed to filibuster on the motion to proceed to the gun package, Reid could take advantage of a new Senate rule “by promising each party two amendments on the legislation.” “Under that scenario, Paul and his allies would still get a chance to raise their objections on the floor for hours on end, but they couldn’t stop the Senate from starting debate on the bill,” Politico reports.

Minutes before President Obama delivered an emotional speech asking lawmakers to pass sensible gun safety measures in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, word came from Capitol Hill that Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) had signed onto a letter pledging to block votes on any of Obama’s proposals for gun legislation.

Obama delivered his speech surrounded by a group of victims of gun violence, including three parents of Newtown victims. All had come to Washington to demand that Congress take action to stop gun violence. Obama’s speech called on average citizens to ask for the same:

The notion that two months or three months after something as horrific as what happened in Newtown happens and we’ve moved on to other things, that’s not who we are. That’s not who we are.

And I want to make sure every American is listening today. Less than 100 days ago that happened, and the entire country was shocked. And the entire country pledged we would do something about it and that this time would be different. Shame on us if we’ve forgotten. I haven’t forgotten those kids. Shame on us if we’ve forgotten.

If there’s one thing I’ve said consistently since I first ran for this office: Nothing is more powerful than millions of voices calling for change. And that’s why it’s so important that all these moms and dads are here today. But that’s also why it’s important that we’ve got grassroots groups out there that got started and are out there mobilizing and organizing and keeping up the fight.

Sen. Mike Lee’s (R-UT) office was the first to announce that Rubio had signed onto the filibuster pledge, a joint effort by the offices of Lee and Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Ted Cruz (R-TX). In an earlier statement, Lee claimed that Obama was using “the tragedy at Newtown as a backdrop for pushing legislation that would have done nothing to prevent that horrible crime.”

There’s no question that some parts of Obama’s gun violence prevention proposals would elicit strong opinions in the Senate, but by promising to filibuster them, Rubio, Lee, Cruz, and Paul are actually blocking the “robust and open debate” that they claim to be seeking. A majority of Americans support background checks and bans on high capacity ammunition, two of the proposals in Obama’s package, but thanks to the filibuster they might never see a debate on the floor.

In his speech on Thursday, Obama pushed for proposals including universal background checks, stricter penalties for people who buy guns with the intention of selling them to criminals (straw purchasers), an assault weapons ban, and a limit on high-capacity magazine clips.