Rand Paul's Filibuster: A Perspective

    A president has to trust the common sense of the American people. On the small stuff the people, wanting  to have faith in the president, will give him wide berth. (Let him flit around on Air Force One while shutting down White House tours.) On the middle stuff he can fool most of the people enough of the time. (Of course he will address spending just as soon as he gets the fat cats to pay their fair share in taxes.) But on the big stuff he can't believe that, as Jack Nicholson's Col Jessup yells in A Few Good Men, "You can't handle the truth." Rand Paul believes that we can.

    The conflict between national security and individual liberty in a post-911 world  is complicated. People of good will on the left and on the right will disagree on much, but the zealots of Code Pink agree with the zealots of the libertarian movement that we need to discuss the limits of government power. John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsay Graham (R-SC) don't want the discussion; Ron Wyden (D-OR), Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Mike Lee (R-UT) do.  

    Unfortunately, Barack Obama is with McCain - perhaps because he is tangled up ideologically; perhaps because he enjoys having few limits on his power; perhaps because he doesn't think in terms of how the Constitution set up the government in the first place. Twelve years after the attacks in New York and Washington, we have:

        - A president who led the criticism of his predecessor's use of "enhanced interrogation technques" refusing to share with the Senate Intelligence Committee the legal rationale supporting the killing of Americans;

        - An administration which insists on calling the murder of 13 people at Fort Hood by Major Hassan an "act of workplace violence";

        - An administration which is told that it cannot close the detention facility at Guantanamo, and doesn't seem to understand (or accept) the difference between civilian and military judicial systems;  

        -  A security establishment which continues to blur the distinction between the role of the CIA and the role of the military in fighting foreign wars;

        -  A Nobel Peace Prize winning president who maintains a central personal role in deciding what targets to approve for drone strikes, without a public discussion of criteria or any judicial review;

        -  The establishment of a cybersecurity mission at the Pentagon with vast powers to monitor civilian travel, purchasing, reading, and assembly patterns with hardly a peep from the folks who went ballistic about Dick Cheney's purported interest in library records.

        -  The New York Times finally reporting on the killing of not only American-born  Al Queda leader Anwar al Awlaki, but also his 16 year old son and another American whose offense was purely in the propaganda realm.  

    Out on the right are the conspiracy theorists who are still incited by the government's ham-handed assaults on a white separatist family at  Ruby Ridge, Idaho in 1992 and the Branch Davidian compound in Waco in 1993, and the Second Amendment advocates who see a need for militias to protect ourselves from King George III.  That thread is not healthy for democracy, but it is fed by Obama's leftist policies and his refusal to acknowledge any limits on government power.   

   Eric Holder's answer to the question before Paul's filibuster - does the president have the authority to kill Americans on American soil without due process and in the absence of an imminent threat?: "It is possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate under the Constitution and applicable laws of the United States for the President to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States."  And after the filibuster, a petulant Holder wrote "The answer to that question is no."

    A small victory for liberty. Thank you Senator Paul.

                                                    -----

  This week's video is a brief year-old exchange about the killing of Americans between Jake Tapper of CNN and President Obama's deliberate know nothing press secretary.

bill bowen - 3/15/2013

 

Comments

[DickG]

A COMMON DENOMINATOR ? To paraphrase the 'reigning queen' of the CPAC Convention, Govr. Palin; "there was ONE 'backbround check' that went incomplete."

[DickG]

JAKE TAPPER; Pres. 'O' hasn't removed his White House Credential ? (Is he holding someone hostage?) He was as good a show as Ann Coulter at CPAC. A little more 'outspokeness'in the Campaign and the Conservatives would have had us out of this mess. Maybe The New Pope ! Pray for us all.

[DickG]

CERTAINLY CONFUSING.I think your two situations would qualify as "imminent threats". What also confuses, however, is the present day irrelevance of 'Security Clearances'. This President would not qualify for one. What a Country !

[Bill McCormick]

Three APPLES---if you have 3 apples and I want as many of them as I can get and I tell you that if you give me one apple then I will discuss your apple needs in the future and you agree then you set the stage for me now negotiating for two apples. An easy solution then becomes ok let's each have one. If you agree I won 2 to 1. After getting one apple in the fiscal cliff tax negotiations, the butter fly like President will now split the difference on the other 2. Alas, the explanation of the emergence of the Butterfly!

[Bill McCormick]

CONFUSED? I'm a little confused by today's "left" and "right" positions. And, this article confirmed my reason to be confused. What is the difference between a drone strike in the Montana wilderness to destroy a pirated nuclear bomb being readied for takeoff in a suicide single engine plane from a Montana airstrip targeted for downtown Seattle (authorized by the President) and a single shot to the head of a crazy criminal holding a pistol to the head of a child in NY city(authorized by the commander of a SWAT team)? Seems we are debating limits of power in nightmare situations. Just as we debated for some time in the elections the use of interrogation techniques in similar situations with the slight difference of the timing of the horror in the future. The President is the Commander in Chief, like him/her or not. One has to trust someone to make the decisions in the time of crisis. After all since the 1950's our President and one other person have had their finger on the trigger of nuclear attack and it has not happened again since Truman authorized it in WWII.

We consider the North Koreans to be child like bluffers and yet we consider Iran to be a serious threat for nuclear attacks? Are either anymore likely to trigger nuclear war than the other? That's why we have intelligence agencies, top secret plus security clearances and a President to decide what to do if they are. Who knows in this world perhaps Sean Penn and Dennis Rodman are CIA agents. Wouldn't that be ironic? Can you imagine the Right celebrating the performance of either of these people as providing the information that allowed us to prempt a terrorist attack?

It is almost as confusing as the emergence like a butterfly from his cocoon of the President beginning to talk with Republicans and acting like he learned how to compromise.