As to the filibuster itself, I wish Sen. Paul would've picked a different topic because Holder is more right than he knows regarding the use of drones in and outside of the country. The problem with the current administration is how their policies leave open the use of drones for law enforcement purposes instead of simply being cabined to the theater of war. John Yoo has more on this significant problem:
Holder’s first mistake is that he thinks that the use of force by drones, no matter where or against whom, is governed by due process. Recall the Justice Department white paper on drones, which asserted that lethal force could not be used against al-Qaeda members unless they could not be captured, harm to the United States was imminent, and due process allows the attack — concepts that govern law-enforcement officers who might need to shoot an attacking criminal, but have never governed the use of force by the military in wartime. Drones don’t change this equation — the same rules should govern snipers, artillery, aerial, and missile attack, which all also attack the enemy from a distance and often by surprise. But since Holder has made the claim that the drone attacks abroad somehow meet law-enforcement standards, it is an easy step for him to say that those same diluted, weakened standards don’t pose much barrier to the use of drones at home.
Instead, what Holder should have said is that the U.S. would only be able to use drones on U.S. soil under the same conditions it might use military force domestically — to stop an invasion by a foreign country or an attack. And it is not because due process somehow allows it, but because the nation is entitled to use military force against foreign attack. So it is not just December 7 or September 11 that uniquely call for military force because the U.S. is responding to an attack on the nation. What about an invasion, as in the War of 1812, or the Civil War, or, on a smaller scale, a situation like the Mumbai terrorist attacks where groups of heavily armed terrorists attacked high-profile, civilian targets not with airliners, but with light arms? If the federal government can use military force, such as troops or helicopters to stop those kinds of attacks, surely it can use drones. But where Holder and this administration are causing fear is because, if they believe the use of drones now, abroad, meet law-enforcement standards, then they believe they could use drones in similar situations domestically to enforce the laws, not to respond to attack. And that is manifestly wrong as a legal matter as well as mistaken as a matter of policy.
Even though I disagree with aspects of Sen. Paul's argument, the use of the filibuster itself was a great thing. Steve Hayward discusses this further:
I agree...that Rand Paul is playing at a dubious game here, but I would add that he has done something significant along the way: he rehabilitated the filibuster, which has been under assault for some time now by the “reformers.” And he did it the old-fashioned way–by standing on the floor of the Senate holding forth about a matter of principle, rather than the faux-filibusters of recent years where people hold up appointments or legislation by a paper “filibuster” that nonetheless allows the Senate to proceed with other business. Though it may not have been Rand Paul’s motive, he may have just laid down a roadblock against the reformers who want to make the Senate into a purely majoritarian institution. The fact that some on the left sympathize with Rand Paul’s cause here will further flummox the reformers.
The filibuster also brings to the forefront the hypocrisy of many liberals like President Obama who evidently think that the waterboarding of three terrorists in Guantanamo Bay (which by the way did result in gaining access to crucial information that would eventually lead to the killing of Osama Bin Laden) was the source of all evil in the modern world but that sending drones into another country and killing a man who was a U.S. citizen (in my eyes he renounced his citizenship when he began helping Al-Qaeda) was no problem at all. One seems quite more severe an action than the other. Maybe it's just me.
Perhaps even most importantly, Sen. Paul showed that politics in the high sense is not dead. Republicans are not doomed to die off like the Whigs did in the early years of the 1850s. If they bring arguments to the forefront in reasoned, impassioned tones that aim to persuade people who are capable of reason, then they will find the benefits to be bountiful.
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