Sen. Rand Paul has made headlines for delivering some long speeches on the Senate floor. In 2015, for example, the Kentucky Republican spoke for more than 10 hours to complain about the Patriot Act, before his colleagues proceeded to ignore his concerns.
Two years earlier, however, Paul held the floor for more than 12 hours. Taking advantage of John Brennan’s nomination to lead the CIA, the GOP senator demanded to know, “Does the president have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?”
As a matter of political theater, it was an impressive display of endurance. But as a substantive matter, the speech was rather odd: No one had suggested that a president had the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil. In fact, shortly after Paul’s stunt, then-Attorney General Eric Holder sent the senator a one-sentence letter — it read, “The answer to that question is no” — and it became obviously that instead of speaking on the Senate floor for nearly 13 hours, Paul could’ve made a two-minute phone call to the Justice Department.
The Republican boasted to CNN soon after, “I kind of won my battle.” Except, there was no battle. There was no one on the other side of the fight. Paul invested 13 hours of his time to get a one-sentence answer, summarizing a position that everyone already knew to be true. It was a spectacle without purpose.
But, the public was told at the time, the GOP lawmaker felt it was all worth it because of his deep, principled concerns about the scope of government power. Paul, ostensibly a prominent voice of his party’s libertarian wing, was compelled to take a stand against the possibility of a president having the power to use military force, on American soil, against a civilian citizen.
A decade later, one of Donald Trump’s lawyers suggested in open court that presidents could order SEAL Team Six to literally murder their political rivals, and that president shouldn’t face criminal prosecution unless a majority of the U.S. House and two-thirds of the U.S. Senate acted first. Asked if he agreed, the Republican effectively endorsed the argument.
Soon after, Trump argued — in writing — that he was entitled to total immunity from prosecution, even from actions that “cross the line.”
Certainly, if anyone in GOP politics is going to have a problem with positions like these, it’s Rand Paul, right? Wrong. HuffPost asked the Kentucky’s junior senator for his take, which fell short.
“It’s a very specific legal argument, and I’m afraid I’m just not up on it enough to be able to comment,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a libertarian-leaning critic of executive overreach who once mounted a 12-hour filibuster on the Senate floor to warn about the threat of drone strikes against U.S. citizens on American soil.
Oh. So when Barack Obama was in the White House, Paul was so terrified of presidential overreach that he held the Senate floor for half a day, for reasons that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. But when Trump claims that presidents must be able to commit crimes with impunity, the Republican senator doesn’t have an opinion because of what he sees as the complexities of the issue.
One is left to wonder if Paul might have more to say if a Democratic president claimed he or she was above the law, and his or her lawyer made the identical argument about using SEAL Team Six to assassinate political rivals.
