Senator Rand Paul is at this moment on his feet in the U.S. Senate rekindling memories of Jimmy Stewart and Frank Capra. The Kentucky senator is doing a filibuster the old fashioned way: non-stop talking and refusing to yield the floor in order to delay a vote on the confirmation of John Brennan as director of the C.I.A. Like the fictional Jefferson Smith in Frank Capra’s classic film “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” Paul will keep going until he literally drops. The C-Span feed from the Senate does not show the apple and the thermos of coffee that Mr. Smith relied upon to keep going but I imagine if, as Stewart did in the movie, the Kentuckian starts reading the Constitution of the United States very slowly, Majority Leader Harry Reid will forget about getting the Senate back to business anytime soon.
Whether you consider this is an edifying spectacle or merely a political sideshow may depend up on your point of view about the reason why Paul has decided to prevent a vote on Brennan. There are good reasons for senators to oppose his bid to run the intelligence agency. But Paul’s belief that the president’s determination to carry the fight against Al Qaeda via drone strikes is a threat to American civil liberties is misplaced. Attempting to hamstring the ability of the government to carry on a foreign war is not defending the rule of law.
Paul’s argument is that granting the president the ability to launch drone strikes on enemy combatants without first going through a legal process threatens our freedoms. Though he has been at pains to say that he doesn’t question the motives of the president, he worries that this power could be used wrongly in the future. The principle he is defending is a good one but he is confused about what is happening in the war against Islamist terrorism. It is not a police action or a civil investigation but a war that must be conducted and judged by very different standards that we would apply to criminal activity at home.
To buttress his view during his nonstop stream of rhetoric, Paul cited the experience of Weimar Germany as an example of an evil leader being democratically elected. Though he was careful not to call anyone in this debate a Hitler, he still claimed that the principle at stake is one in which our freedoms could be lost in a similar manner.
The mere mention of Hitler or of George Orwell’s “Big Brother” (as he did later in his speech) even with disclaimers is both foolish and inflammatory. The executive branch of the government has the responsibility to defend the people of the United States against their enemies. It would be nice if those tasked with fighting Al Qaeda could do so as if they were detectives on the beat, but such an expectation betrays a lack of understanding of this conflict.
The liberty that Rand Paul wants to defend is sacred. He does well to worry about the growth of government and the accretion of power in the hands of the executive without checks and balances provided by the law. But preserving that liberty requires an active defense. Stopping our armed forces and the president from killing the enemy wherever they can be found cannot preserve the rule of law.
There is good reason to fear that President Obama doesn’t have sufficient respect for the limits that the Constitution places on his power to act. But whatever we might think about his domestic power grabs, his willingness to order strikes on those plotting to kill Americans is not a threat to freedom. To use the example the senator repeatedly invoked, the president can’t wait until a plane is about to hit an American target. Waiting until the threat is imminent in that manner would be a dereliction of duty on the president’s part, not a defense of liberty.
The only real analogy to Hitler and totalitarianism in this debate is to the ideology of those Islamists that the administration has targeted. Paul has every right to keep talking and Brennan is not a good choice to run the CIA but using this nomination to stop drone strikes abroad is ill advised.
This is awesome, God forbid if a drone strike happens on American citizens on US soil.
It’s extraordinarily frustrating that Paul is lending new support to the US tendency to pull punches due to a reluctance, now of 15 years standing, to confront the fact that it is in a war. After the East Africa embassy bombings, the CIA went to great lengths and considerable risks to reestablish alliances and agent networks in Afghanistan to target al Qaeda and bin Laden, and developed plans to kidnap or kill UBL using Afghan proxies. The White House refused to permit any such operation supposedly lest these local agents mess it up. In January 2000, after the global Millenium plot was thwartec, the Administration insisted that CIA get American eyes on bin Laden. So the agency went to new great lengths to accomplish that. This was where the Predator got its start as a CT weapon. CIA officers fished out a Predator drone from mothballs where the Air Force had consigned it after it proved useful in the Balkan wars, spent millions to create an appropriate satellite-based control system, and launched an intensive operation inside Afghanistan to collect intelligence to direct and focus
the drone. Ultimately, Agency officers found themselves eyeballing UBL himself at his farm compound outside Khandahar. The agency immediately sought White House authorization for a military strike on the compound, which was refused on the grounds that it would take six hours to put US cruise missiles or bombs on the target at which time UBL might have left.
It was crushing disappointment at this which prompted the CIA to realize that it needed a weapons system that could put ordnance on targets immediately in response to solid intelligence. That quest led to arming Predators with the Army’s Hellfire missiles.
Dumb-down boys! this is ain’t Ron Paul the great. nBrennan must be not filibustered but court-martialed for hiring Atari IT-illiterate Rednecks who shoot at anything moves on drone’s screens murdering babies, elders and women probably in Nebraska thinking that they’re killing Taliban in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda excels bankrupting Pentagon by fooling over-overpriced Boeing Graft Prodigals into warring videogames. My question is: How much Koch Brothers made to get Brennan CIA which filibustered by their poodle Rand Paul? Deranged Teeebaagerzz. Rand Paul Filibusters Brennan Nomination! You must be kidding. Rand Paul must Filibuster himself. Rand Paul Filibuster will be clotured by Dems Majority. He just made Charles Koch billionaire number 6 and David Koch billionaire number 7 on FORBES 2013. Both Koch Brothers net worth is $68B. It’s only cost them under $2M to buy the honorable Jim Bunning senate seat for Rand Paul to dishonor us all. As Orwell contradictory rules hypocrisy rigs neutrality. n
bs'd nWOW! Someone is very angry.
Just want to say what a superb, trenchant, well written piece this is by Tobin.
The Republican Party is lucky to have Rand Paul. We need many voices to debate within our tent to reach a consensus conservative view going forward. I support drones in foreign lands for any American enemy especially if he is an American traitor. I oppose all drones in the USA. Here we can go get them dead or alive. Sen. Paul of course is especially good on relearning how to live within our means not central to this issue. I hope the Senate gives him bathroom breaks as a personal courtesy and hope his filibuster goes a really long time.
Mr. Tobin, are you sure you are not a Daily Kos mole? Senator Paul has gone on record in support of drone strikes on enemy combatant leadership if capture isn't feasible. You're putting words in his mouth so you can make him out to be a member of the anti anti-terror fringe. He is not. He is a member of the statesman fringe. He deserves your support which I am sure will be forthcoming unless you are that mole I suspect. n nPlease keep in mind a prerequisite for having a president willing to protect America is having a president wanting to protect America. The one we have certainly does as long as he is winning. Once he starts losing it will be "The hell with ya, I'm leaving for the land of the Hugo's."