Opinion Talk till you drop
Rand Pauls 12-hour filibuster was a change of pace from business as usual in the Senate
Senator Rand Paul has his faults. Who among us can forget the time he ranted at a representative of the department of energy about the inadequacy of his bathroom plumbing? But you have to give him credit for effort. On Wednesday,the capital was under a snowstorm warning,and you know how wimpy people in Washington get when theres even a hint of snow. Everybody wanted to get out and get home. Then Paul brought the Senate to a grinding halt by staging a filibuster against the nomination of John Brennan to be head of the CIA.
Im here today to speak for as long as I can hold up, he announced. And off he went.
Paul had no particular problem with the nomination,which he acknowledged was going to pass once he stopped talking. But the debate over Brennan had brought up the question of drone strikes. The junior senator from Kentucky wanted President Obama to promise not to use drones to kill Americans on American soil. At least we need to know what are the rules, he said sometime during hour five.
Fair enough. The Obama administration had been unnecessarily dodgy on this point. The very fact that the president was ordering the death of American citizens anywhere without oversight was worrying. Shouldnt there be a special court to sign off on these things? I really dont think hell drop a Hellfire missile on a cafe in Houston, admitted Paul. But he pressed for a clear line. In the process,he quoted from Alice in Wonderland,analysed a Supreme Court ruling on birth control and expressed a negative opinion about Jane Fonda.
The whole drama was most important as a mirror to the way the Senate normally does business. Look at what happened on Wednesday,people,and you can see why Democratic reformers wanted to change the rules and bring back the talking filibuster. Compare Pauls behaviour to that of Mitch McConnell,the minority leader. Earlier in the day,McConnell had staged a filibuster under the usual system: He blocked the nomination of Caitlin Halligan to the DC circuit court by filing a piece of paper.
Paul has,in the past,been willing to work on that side of the road himself. But his performance on Wednesday was different,an arresting combination of endurance,ego and principle. It was only the second filibuster speech to break the five-hour mark since 1992. The other was in 2010,when Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont led an eight-and-a-half-hour rant against the extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.
You dont want to get carried away with the romance of this kind of thing. The talkathon in 1992 was staged by the deeply pragmatic Al DAmato of New York to save an upstate typewriter factory. Still,after years of faux filibusters,it was a nice change of pace. Exhausting yourself and irritating your colleagues for a cause is way better than stopping progress without taking the least bit of trouble.
Share
