GONE FILIBUSTERIN’
Mar. 8th, 2013 11:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
defrogOr: “From now on, ‘grandstanding’ will be known as ‘Rand-standing’ ”
As you no doubt know, yesterday Sen. Rand Paul spent the day filibusterin’ all over John Brennan’s nomination vote.
It looked like this.
Ha ha. No, it didn’t, really. But I’m sure Rand Paul thought it did.
Anyway, Republicans filibustering Obama nominations is nothing new. Hey, they did it just the other day to shoot down an appellate court nominee on the grounds that she’s not pre-approved by the NRA.
But the Rand Paul filibuster is worth highlighting because he made such a strong case against using drone strikes on US citizens that he (possibly intentionally, possibly accidentally) called into question over a decade’s worth of govt policy that has essentially asserted the legal right of the US govt to stomp all over the civil liberties of anyone it thinks is guilty of terrorism (or drug smuggling, or whatever).
Danger Room has a nice write-up about it here.
Even more to the point, says Danger Room, Paul actually got some of the GOP’s more hawkish senators – all of whom have generally supported the very perpetual war, secrecy in the name of national security and due-process-avoiding tactics that have characterized the War On Terrorz ever since the Bush Posse concocted it – to agree with him.
Whether any of them will actually doing anything about this apart from blocking Obama nominations on general principle is another question entirely. I seriously doubt it. For a start, I think most of the senators who joined in were just giving Paul a chance to rest his vocal cords and think up a new angle to run with for another two hours. And I do think many of them see the issue mainly as a chance to put it in the heads of The American People™ that Obama (not the US govt, but Obama specifically) wants to kill them with drones without due process, and they oppose that.
Certainly John McCain and Lindsay Graham were not impressed or amused by young Rand's antics. If yr gonna filibuster a CIA director nomination vote, why spend 13 hours talking about killing Americans with US drones when the REAL issue is killing Americans with BENGHAZI.
Also, most of the focus of post-mortem discussion seems more concerned with the specific scenario of a US drone strike on US citizens on US soil – which most reasonable people agree is unlikely to ever actually happen if only for sheer political reasons. And Eric Holder has since finally admitted that it’s probably illegal (at least if it happens on US soil and yr not talking about a 9/11 scenario – if America drone-strikes its citizens while they’re overseas, it is totally legal as far as Holder is concerned).
So if Rand’s filibusterin’ is an indictment of the entire post-9/11 paradigm of Perpetual War and Gitmo and the Patriot Act and torture chambers and legalized assassinations and warrantless wiretaps to date, it’s likely Danger Room and the usual civil-libertarian crowd that has been saying this for years are the only ones who’ve noticed.
Still, you have to start somewhere, I guess.
If it takes all night,
This is dF
As you no doubt know, yesterday Sen. Rand Paul spent the day filibusterin’ all over John Brennan’s nomination vote.
It looked like this.
Ha ha. No, it didn’t, really. But I’m sure Rand Paul thought it did.
Anyway, Republicans filibustering Obama nominations is nothing new. Hey, they did it just the other day to shoot down an appellate court nominee on the grounds that she’s not pre-approved by the NRA.
But the Rand Paul filibuster is worth highlighting because he made such a strong case against using drone strikes on US citizens that he (possibly intentionally, possibly accidentally) called into question over a decade’s worth of govt policy that has essentially asserted the legal right of the US govt to stomp all over the civil liberties of anyone it thinks is guilty of terrorism (or drug smuggling, or whatever).
Danger Room has a nice write-up about it here.
“When people talk about a ‘battlefield America’,” Paul said, around hour four, Americans should “realize they’re telling you your Bill of Rights don’t apply.” That is a consequence of the September 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force that did not bound a war against al-Qaida to specific areas of the planet. “We can’t have perpetual war. We can’t have a war with no temporal limits,” Paul said. […]
Paul sometimes seemed to object to the specific platform of drones used against Americans more than it did the platform-independent subject of targeted killing. But Paul actually centered his long monologue on the expansive legal claims implied by targeting Americans for due-process-free execution: “If you get on a kill list, it’s kind of hard to complain…. If you’re accused of a crime, I guess that’s it…. I don’t want a politician deciding my innocence or guilt.” Paul threw in criticisms of other aspects of the war on terrorism beyond targeted killing, from widespread surveillance of Americans to the abuses of state/Homeland Security intelligence “fusion centers.”
Paul sometimes seemed to object to the specific platform of drones used against Americans more than it did the platform-independent subject of targeted killing. But Paul actually centered his long monologue on the expansive legal claims implied by targeting Americans for due-process-free execution: “If you get on a kill list, it’s kind of hard to complain…. If you’re accused of a crime, I guess that’s it…. I don’t want a politician deciding my innocence or guilt.” Paul threw in criticisms of other aspects of the war on terrorism beyond targeted killing, from widespread surveillance of Americans to the abuses of state/Homeland Security intelligence “fusion centers.”
Even more to the point, says Danger Room, Paul actually got some of the GOP’s more hawkish senators – all of whom have generally supported the very perpetual war, secrecy in the name of national security and due-process-avoiding tactics that have characterized the War On Terrorz ever since the Bush Posse concocted it – to agree with him.
Whether any of them will actually doing anything about this apart from blocking Obama nominations on general principle is another question entirely. I seriously doubt it. For a start, I think most of the senators who joined in were just giving Paul a chance to rest his vocal cords and think up a new angle to run with for another two hours. And I do think many of them see the issue mainly as a chance to put it in the heads of The American People™ that Obama (not the US govt, but Obama specifically) wants to kill them with drones without due process, and they oppose that.
Certainly John McCain and Lindsay Graham were not impressed or amused by young Rand's antics. If yr gonna filibuster a CIA director nomination vote, why spend 13 hours talking about killing Americans with US drones when the REAL issue is killing Americans with BENGHAZI.
Also, most of the focus of post-mortem discussion seems more concerned with the specific scenario of a US drone strike on US citizens on US soil – which most reasonable people agree is unlikely to ever actually happen if only for sheer political reasons. And Eric Holder has since finally admitted that it’s probably illegal (at least if it happens on US soil and yr not talking about a 9/11 scenario – if America drone-strikes its citizens while they’re overseas, it is totally legal as far as Holder is concerned).
So if Rand’s filibusterin’ is an indictment of the entire post-9/11 paradigm of Perpetual War and Gitmo and the Patriot Act and torture chambers and legalized assassinations and warrantless wiretaps to date, it’s likely Danger Room and the usual civil-libertarian crowd that has been saying this for years are the only ones who’ve noticed.
Still, you have to start somewhere, I guess.
If it takes all night,
This is dF
