By Andy Furman
NKyTribune reporter
Talk about your odd couple – try this one on for size: One grew up on a farm in Peach Grove, Pendleton County. The other is a son of a former three-time presidential candidate and 12-term U.S. representative from Texas. One taught high school at Northern Kentucky’s Scott and Cooper – while the other is an American politician serving as the junior United States senator from Kentucky since 2011.
Yet, there Billy Matthews was, addressing the Covington Rotary Club at their luncheon at the Radisson Hotel this week.
“I’m like a Bird Dog,” he told the Northern Kentucky Tribune. “We find problems and relay them back to Senator Randal Howard Paul.”
Yes, Billy Matthews serves as one of Paul’s Kentucky Field Representatives.
“I have an 11-county area that consists of Boone, Kenton, Campbell, Pendleton, Harrison, Grant, Owen, Gallatin, Carroll, Henry, and Trimble. I am the office liaison to FEMA and Kentucky Emergency Management,” the Northern Kentucky University graduate (’07),” said.
Matthews says he travels the entire state, and gets to see first-hand just how beautiful and diverse the Commonwealth really is.
“I’ve been to over 100 of the counties in my official capacity,” he said. “I find all the small mom and pop restaurants that are off the beaten path, that have the absolute best food, and I help Kentuckians navigate the endless hoops of federal bureaucratic tape.”
That’s the good part.
“The hardest part,” he continued, “is seeing the people who have lost everything from catastrophes like fires and tornadoes.”
It’s been a long leap for Billy Matthews who majored in Social Studies and Education with a minor in Political Science at NKU. Scott High was his first stop as a social studies teacher – lasted one year with teacher cuts. Next stop – Boone County’s Cooper High School, where he served as boys soccer coach.
“I volunteered as the Union Rep at Cooper,” he said. “But in 2010 I found myself unemployed.”
He worked at Tractor Supply after his unemployment ran out and in 2012 found employment at a Duke Energy power plant through 2015 – and said he built relationships as a Republican Party treasurer, which led him to senator Paul’s office late that same year.
“Building relationships were the key,” he says, “and the only qualifications – are you a Kentuckian and do you need help.”
Senator Rand Paul was elected to the Senate in 2010, and is one of the nation’s leading advocates for liberty, championing constitutional and fiscal responsibility. A member of the Republican Party, he has described himself as a constitutional conservative and is a supporter of the Tea Party movement. His libertarian views have been compared to those of his father, Ron Paul.
And he is no friend of former White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci.
In fact, one Rotarian asked of the feud between those two was real.
“The people said go get him (Fauci), and he (Paul) did. Their relationship is not good,” Matthews said.
In September 2020, Paul was the lone Republican to vote against the COVID-19 aid package introduced by Senator Mitch McConnell, joining the Democrats who unanimously voted against it. Paul’s grievance with the bill was the accumulation to the debt it would have triggered.
In fact, Paul said he thinks Fauci deserved jail time. Paul argued that the former infectious disease doctor lied to Congress by flip-flopping on where the COVID virus began in public and in private.
After the 2020 presidential election, Paul refused to accept Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s victory against Donald Trump and falsely claimed that the election was “stolen.”
Senator Paul presents evidence that the COVID virus was likely the product of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab in China — research funded in part by the U.S. government — in his book, Deception: The Great Covid Cover-up.
Just another fire for Billy Matthews to extinguish.