Common Sense

This Week in Common Sense is Paul Jacob's weekend wrap-up of the big stories of the week, as they appear on “This Is Common Sense with Paul Jacob,” his commentary page at thisiscommonsense.org.

Paul Jacob is president of the Liberty Initiative Fund, a national organization helping citizens place issues on the ballot to protect individual liberty and hold government accountable.

“If there’s anyone who’s been involved in more citizen initiative campaigns in the history of this country [than Paul Jacob],” said Los Angeles Times reporter Joe Mathews, “I’m not aware of them.”

For more than a decade, Paul was the term limits movement’s leading voice, running U.S. Term Limits, the nation’s largest such group. For his work to bring term limits to Congress, columnist Robert Novak good-naturedly called Jacob “the most hated man in Washington.”

Campaigning for term limits, as well as for spending caps, property rights measures and candidate ballot access, Paul has been involved in over 175 statewide petition drives.

Currently, Paul Jacob hosts Common Sense, an online and print opinion program that reaches tens of thousands of online readers and e-mail subscribers. His new podcast is an informal recap of the week's major stories as covered on thisiscommonsense.com — hence the title, This Week in Common Sense.

“The best way to assure freedom of expression, no matter where it may be threatened,” Pulitzer-prize winning columnist, Paul Greenberg, wrote recently, “would be to have an army of utterly determined Paul Jacob fighting for it.”

Paul won the “Courage Under Fire” award at the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference. He has also been named “a rising star in politics” by Campaigns & Elections magazine, received the Society for Individual Liberty’s “Phoenix Award” for “contributions to the advancement of liberty in America,” and was dubbed one of “The Best and the Rightest” by National Journal.

His writing has been featured in USA Today, The Washington Times, The New York Daily News, Roll Call, Human Events, The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Examiner and other publications. He has appeared on numerous television programs and is a consistent guest on talk radio.

During the late 1970s and 1980s, Jacob held a number of positions in the Libertarian Party, including serving as chairman of the Arkansas Libertarian Party, national director of the national Libertarian Party and also national ballot access coordinator. Paul also served on the Libertarian National Committee — a position he was elected to from his federal prison cell, while serving a six month sentence for refusing to register for the military draft.

Paul currently serves on the boards of Citizens in Charge, a non-partisan group working to protect and expand voter initiative rights, and the Citizens in Charge Foundation, a charitable foundation conducting research on the initiative process, educating the public and litigating to defend petition rights — both groups he founded. He also serves on the board of the Great Communicators Foundation, a charitable foundation providing communication training to pro-liberty activists, and on the board of the Taxpayers United of America.

Paul lives with his wife Rhonda in Woodbridge, Virginia. They have three children and two grandchildren.