Three Democratic Myths Used to Demean the Paul Filibuster
Some Democrats, to their credit, publicly supported Paul, including Sen. Ron Wyden, who went to the Senate floor to assist the filibuster. Sens. Jeff Merkley, Pat Leahy and (independent) Bernie Sanders all voted against Brennan’s confirmation, citing many of the same concerns raised by Paul. Some prominent progressive commentators praised Paul’s filibuster as well: on CNN, Van Jones - while vowing that “I love this president” - said “Sen. Rand Paul was a hero for civil liberties” and that “liberals and progressives should be ashamed.”
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To accomplish that, most avoided full-throated defenses of drones and the power of the president to secretly order US citizens executed without due process or transparency. They prefer to ignore the fact that the politician they most deeply admire is a devoted defender of those policies. After stumbling around for a few days in search of a tactic to convert this episode into an attack on the GOP and distract from Obama’s extremism, they collectively settled on personalizing the conflict by focusing on Rand Paul’s flaws as a person and a politician and, in particular, mocking his concerns as “paranoia” (that attack was echoed, among others, by the war-cheering Washington Post editorial page).
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The reality is that Paul was doing nothing more than voicing concerns that have long been voiced by leading civil liberties groups such as the ACLU. Indeed, the ACLU lavishly praised Paul, saying that “as a result of Sen. Paul’s historic filibuster, civil liberties got two wins”. In particular, said the ACLU, “Americans learned about the breathtakingly broad claims of executive authority undergirding the Obama administration’s vast killing program.”But almost without exception, progressives who defend Obama’s Terrorism policies steadfastly ignore the fact that they are embracing policies that are vehemently denounced by the ACLU. That’s because they like to tell themselves that only Big, Bad Republicans attack the ACLU - such as when George H.W. Bush tried to marginalize Michael Dukakis in 1988 by linking him to that group - so they ignore the ACLU and instead pretend that only right-wing figures like Rand Paul are concerned about these matters. It’s remarkable indeed how frequently, in the Age of Obama, standard partisan Democrats embrace exactly the policies identified by the ACLU as the most menacing.
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In sum, virtually all of the claims made by these progressive commentators in opposition to Paul’s filibuster are false. Moreover, last week’s Senate drama, and the reaction to it by various factions, reveals several critical points about how US militarism and the secrecy that enables it are sustained. I was traveling last week on a speaking tour and thus watched all of it unfold without writing about it, so I want to highlight three key points from all of this, centered around myths propagated by Democrats to demean Paul’s filibuster and the concerns raised by it:
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This is a very interesting article with a lot of merit. I don’t like partisanship just for partisanship’s sake and I don’t like to watch public officials ignore issues which violate their own personal morality just to attack their opponents.