Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain took to the Senate floor Thursday to excoriate Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul’s filibuster of CIA director nominee John Brennan over the issue of whether the president has the authority to use a drone strike to kill an American on U.S. soil.
McCain began his remarks by reading Thursday’s critical Wall Street Journal editorial of Paul’s filibuster, titled “Rand Paul’s Drone Rant.”
“The country needs more senators who care about liberty, but if Mr. Paul wants to be taken seriously he needs to do more than pull political stunts that fire up impressionable libertarian kids in their college dorms,” the editorial concludes. “He needs to know what he’s talking about.”
“I don’t think that what happened yesterday is helpful to the American people,” McCain said after reading the editorial.
“We need a discussion, as I said, about exactly how we are going to address this new form of almost interminable warfare, which is very different from anything we ever faced in the past. But somehow to allege the United States of America, our government, would drop a drone hellfire missile on Jane Fonda, that brings the conversation from a serious discussion about U.S. policy to the realm of the ridiculous.”
Paul’s filibuster Wednesday lasted nearly 13 hours, concluding just after midnight this morning.
