Bold Move

Impressed by his insistent, often-solitary championing of civil liberties in the U.S. Senate, I twice wrote that Rand Paul should be our next President. But at that time I knew it was just a pipe dream because the Republican’s national name recognition was so low. Now, thanks to his filibuster during the Senate’s ultimate confirmation of John Brennan as CIA director, Paul has become a viable 2016 candidate. Even more surprising, Kentucky’s junior senator barely uttered a word about Brennan throughout the electric 13 hours he spent addressing his fellow lawmakers on March 6, 2013.

Two days later this new media phenomenon made his goal much clearer in a Washington Post op-ed titled “My filibuster was just the beginning.”

For years I’ve been complaining in HUSTLER about the apathy of Congress and much of the country with regard to how the Bush-Cheney regime and then Obama’s formulated their own rules of law against terrorism. That’s why Rand Paul “wanted to sound an alarm bell from coast to coast. I wanted everybody to know that our Constitution is precious and that”—dig this, fellow citizens—” no American should be killed by a drone without first being charged with a crime. As Americans, we have fought long and hard for the Bill of Rights. The idea that no person shall be held without due process, and that no person shall be held for a capital offense without being indicted, is a founding American principle and a basic right.”