Tag Archives: Nomination

The 2004 Republican National Convention, held in New York City
as close as possible to the three-year anniversary of the day the
World Trade Center was pulverized by terrorists, was a three-day
festival of chest-thumping snarls directed at anyone who’d dare
mention the concepts of civil liberties or executive branch
restraint.
“Which leader is it today that has the vision, the willpower,
and, yes, the backbone to best protect my family?” asked turncoat
Sen. Zell Miller (D-Ga.), in the most celebrated of the
convention’s speeches. “Sen. Kerry has made it clear that he would
use military force only if approved by the United Nations. Kerry
would let Paris decide when America needs defending. I want Bush to
decide!”
Conservatism was united in wanting President George W. Bush to
be the sole decider on all matters related to a massive, open-ended
effort to play “offense, not defense” in the War on Terror. And it
was a popular message among non-conservatives, as evidenced by the
results of the 2004 election. Even self-described libertarians at
the time were busy dreaming up hypothetical ticking time-bomb
scenarios to justify the heretofore beyond-the-pale use of
torture.
For those of us who oppose torture, who reckon that the proper
purpose of a military is defense, and who believe that
Lord Acton’s “power corrupts” insight can also apply to American
armed forces, no matter how noble-sounding the cause, the
Republican Convention, and the era surrounding it, was a kind of
fever dream.
And the terror sweats hardly stopped with the 2008 Republican
nomination of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). Yes, McCain was against
torture, having had his legs and shoulders repeatedly smashed by
the Viet Cong. But his foreign policy and his vision of unshackled
executive power were the most robustly interventionist since the
final presidential candidacy of his hero, Teddy Roosevelt.
McCain advocated “rogue-state rollback,” a doctrine of
supporting rebels against tyrants and then treating them like full
military allies should the dictator crack down. He thought it was
funny to re-imagine the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann” as “Bomb, bomb,
bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.” He bashed libertarians and individualists
and “isolationists” at every turn, while lauding Roosevelt for
“liberally interpreting the constitutional authority of the office
to redress the imbalance of power between the executive and
legislative branches.”
You might have thought that McCain’s defeat at the hands of a
former constitutional law professor who rallied the anti-war vote
with his talk of a more restrained approach to presidential
warmaking would have proved a decisive turning point in the
national conversation about war and civil liberties. But the 2008
general election hinged far more on the economy than foreign
affairs. And then Barack Obama did what all new presidents do: He
learned to love executive power.
With most of the left’s anti-war and pro–civil liberties blocs
in his pocket, President Obama launched a war in Libya without
congressional approval, diverted Troubled Assets Relief Program
funds to automobile companies in direct defiance of Congress,
defended state secrets privileges in court, prosecuted
whistleblowers, and launched a secret program allowing the
president to drone to death anyone he deems to be an enemy
combatant, no matter if they were on the battlefield, inside a
country not at war with the U.S., an American citizen (as was the
case with pro-jihadi Anwar al-Awlaki), or even just that American
citizen’s teenaged son.
So grotesque has been Obama’s use of his secret “kill list” that
when former White House press secretary and then–Obama campaign
spokesman Robert Gibbs was asked in October 2012 to justify the
drone assassination of 16-year-old U.S. citizen Abdulharman
al-Awlaki, he had the chutzpah to say, “I would suggest that you
should have a far more responsible father, if they are truly
concerned about the well being of their children. I don’t think
becoming an Al Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about
doing your business.”
As was certainly known to the Obama administration, Abdulharman
was killed two weeks after his father, who he reportedly
hadn’t seen in two years. Gibbs, a recent hire by the liberal cable
network MSNBC, made headlines in February when he admitted that
“one of the first things they told me” at the White House was
“You’re not even to acknowledge the drone program. You’re not even
to discuss that it exists.”
In the midst of this decade-long madness, this horrifying,
covert embrace of extra-judicial robot death squads, a
self-described libertarian Republican, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky,
stood up for 13 hours on the Senate floor March 6 and yelled
“Stop!” What began just before noon as a quixotic, one-man
filibuster of CIA director nominee John Brennan (who, in another
indication of the Obama-era civil liberties deterioration, had been
deemed too pro-torture by Democrats as recently as 2008), soon
evolved into a phenomenon the likes of which we may have never
seen.
Instead of reading through a phone book or quoting random texts
to kill the time and dull his colleagues’ ears, Paul launched a
cogent, comprehensive, and inspirational half-day critique of
bipartisan executive overreach. By framing his objection as a
simple attempt to get an answer from the White House on one narrow
but fundamental question—does the administration believe it has the
legal and constitutional right to assassinate Americans by drone on
U.S. soil?—Paul was able to rally unlikely allies and
expose the opposition as arrogant defenders of unchecked lethal
power.
“I will speak as long as it takes,” he began, “until the alarm
is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important,
that your rights to trial by jury are precious, that no American
should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being
charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a
court.”
As the day wore on, the hashtag #StandWithRand became the
biggest-trending topic on Twitter. Congressmen and senators,
including some who had been out to dinner that night with President
Obama, began streaming back into the Capitol as word spread through
town that something historic was afoot. Rising Tea Party star Ted
Cruz gleefully read Twitter encouragements on the Senate floor and
stressed that this moment was equally about the overreach of his
fellow Texan George W. Bush. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) quoted
impishly if randomly from rappers Jay-Z and Wiz Khalifa. As the
hour approached midnight, suddenly there was Minority Leader (and
former vociferous opponent of Rand Paul) Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on
the floor singing Paul’s praises, followed quickly by Minority Whip
John Thune (R-S.D.). In the course of the night you could feel the
madness starting to lift.
When the sun came up, Washington,D.C., suddenly felt like a
different place. Rand Paul was drawing raves, sometimes
reluctantly, from Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Charles
Krauthammer on the right, Van Jones, Code Pink, and the American
Civil Liberties Union on the left, and all sorts of less
categorizable human beings in-between. His detractors seemed
shrill, hyperbolic, and defensive—John McCain called Paul and Cruz
“wacko birds,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board
sneered at “impressionable libertarian kids in their college
dorms,” MSNBC commentator Lawrence O’Donnell condemned “the vile
spewing madness that came out of that crazy person’s mouth,” and
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) lamented to his colleagues, “I’m a bit
disappointed that you no longer apparently think we’re at war.”
Even hawks such as Washington Post commentator Jennifer
Rubin thought Rand Paul got the best of the exchange. McCain and
Graham “never looked so old school and out to lunch as they did
today,” she wrote. Rubin’s headline, or a version thereof, was on a
lot of people’s minds after the filibuster was finished: “Rand Paul
wins: Changing of the guard?” One can only hope. ; … Read More