Harry Reid then: "My Republican colleagues claim that nominees are entitled to an up-down vote. That claim ignores history, including recent history."
Harry Reid now: "These nominees deserve at least an up-or-down vote. But Republican filibusters deny them a fair vote and deny the president his team."
So, what really happened in the past eight years to cause such blatant and unforgivable hypocrisy? The Democrats have their false narratives and their revisionist history but the fact of the matter is that only one thing has changed since 2005: The Democrats became the majority party in the Senate. If you believe anything else, then you really need to kick the Kool-aid habit and give reality another chance.
In a rare, traditional filibuster, Sen. Rand Paul vowed to speak on the Senate floor “as long as it takes” to draw attention to his concerns about the Obama administration’s policy regarding the targeted killing of American terrorism suspects. But as Ben Shapiro at Breitbart points out, it wound up being so much more than that:
On Wednesday, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) served notice to both the Republican establishment and to the Democrat-Media Complex: conservatism isn’t gone. It’s not even on vacation. The new wave of conservatives is here, and they know how to play the game.
At approximately 11:47 a.m. EST, Paul took to the floor of the Senate to filibuster the nomination of counterterrorism czar John Brennan for CIA Director. Paul stated his reason specifically and clearly: the Obama administration has refused to answer question as to whether they believe it is acceptable under the Constitution to kill American citizens on US soil using drones if those citizens are not engaged in an immediate terrorist threat. Paul was broader than that, actually – he simply asked the administration for a set of rules that could be used to limit their power to execute American citizens here at home. Over and over again, the administration refused to turn over the legal memos detailing its policies.
And so Paul talked. And boy, did he talk. For nearly 13 hours, he talked, taking breaks only when spelled by Senators including fellow Tea Partiers Mike Lee (R-UT), Ted Cruz (R-TX), Marco Rubio (R-FL), and Pat Toomey (R-PA). Even an honest Democrat – apparently the only one in the chamber – got into the act: Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR). Citing everyone from left to right, Paul pointed out the hypocrisy of an administration ripping into waterboarding of terrorists but happy to target them for death from the skies. He asked repeatedly why the administration could not answer his simple question about the boundaries of government power. And the American people listened.
One of the remarkable things about Paul's filibuster was that he's a Tea Party guy. He's so Tea Party that he gave the Tea Party response to the President's SOTU speech. And yet he was getting support from true Leftists such as Van Jones, Cenk Uygur, the ACLU, Code Pink! Amazing.
Now, do they support Rand Paul as a politician? Of course not. But that's the brilliance of what he did. He took a principled stand on an issue that many Democrats would have embraced if it wasn't Obama in the White House. He created a situation in which allies of Obama were forced to abandon him and take sides with a Tea Party senator from Kentucky in order to stay true to their own beliefs on the issue. What a spectacle it was!
And it had to be very uncomfortable for many liberals to have to stay silent because they couldn't bring themselves to support Rand Paul but in their heart of hearts they can't honestly support Obama. For 13 hours Rand Paul showed the GOP how to stand up and fight and in doing so created an opportunity for his peers to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with him. And as somebody pointed out, it was 13 hours of policy discussion, not a reading of the telephone book or some other stunts.
And when Dick Durbin tried to muddy the waters by asking questions that had either already been answered or never asked in the first place, many of the senators who had already spoken came back to speak again in order to refute and defeat Durbin's cynical efforts.
John Sexton at Breitbart has the transcript of the first hour of the filibuster here.
National Review live-blogged the filibuster and have several clips of various speakers here.
