Bouncing off Paul’s CPAC barn-burner, Philip Klein wonders if the GOP would regress on civil liberties under a Republican president:

Following Paul’s speech, I spoke with Matt Kibbe, president of the limited-government activist group FreedomWorks, about whether the momentum for a greater focus on civil liberties would be stopped if Republicans recaptured the White House.

“The younger people that are joining either the Republican Party or the conservative movement care about civil liberties a lot,” Kibbe argued. “And so it’s going to be hard to put the genie back in the bottle unless you want the party to die out.”

My view is that under a Republican president, criticism of any perceived overreaching on surveillance would be greater than it was under Bush, but not nearly as fierce as it is under Obama.

That’s a pretty inarguable fact. If he wins the nomination, of course, all this would be moot, and we’d finally be able to see what might happen in a genuine libertarian were to become president. But even if Paul loses, he will surely open the debate in the primaries on this subject, and as Klein notes, be a thorn in the side of any future surveillance state enthusiasm in a Republican administration. And indications of a genuine libertarian resurgence in the GOP are increasing:

Today on the main stage [at CPAC] in front of a packed audience of several hundred I watched a Republican governor from Texas brag about closing prisons while mocking California’s woefully over-stuffed corrections facilities. Rick Perry’s criminal justice record is by no means angelic, but he is at or near the head of the gubernatorial class when it comes to meaningful reform.)

Groups like Right on Crime now compete for booth space with Families Against Mandatory Minimums, Justice Fellowship, and—shockingly to those of us of a certain age—Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty. The libertarian project of criminal justice reform is coming to this country in 2014, and though some important impetus has come from self-identified libertarian Republicans …, much of it has also come from social conservatives with hearts open to redemption, and fiscal conservatives shocked at the bottom line. Libertarian projects become viable when non-libertarians (and even anti-libertarians) embrace them.

I just wonder how the absence of Obama will impact the Republican id in these matters.

(Photo: Students Dragana Bozic (L) of New York City and Pi Praveen of Durham, NC, pose for a photograph with a life-size cutout photo of Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) at the Conservative Political Action Conference at the Gaylord International Hotel and Conference Center in National Harbor, Maryland on March 7, 2014 . By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)