Too bad, said Senator Ted Cruz. Then, sounding quite mad, Cruz constructs a hypothetical situation where "if [bin Laden] were not in Pakistan, if he were living in an apartment in the suburbs of Chicago, and if he were asleep in bed -- and even if he were Osama bin Laden, a really, really, really bad guy -- there is nothing in the Constitution that gives the Federal Government the authority to fire a missile at an apartment with a sleeping person in it in the United States of America if that individual was a U.S. citizen."
In finally yielding the floor, Senator Paul concluded by encouraging the president to "obey the fifth amendment; that the constitution does apply to all Americans and there are no exceptions."
Thursday morning, Senator Paul received an answer from the Attorney General: "no." No, the President does not have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil. While Paul did a victory lap, he must realize that his concerns about imminence, enemy combatants and geography were not answered.
Holder's answer is consistent with the fact that a Nidal Hasan or a Faisal Shahzad would still be enemy combatants posing imminent threats to the United States by engaging in combat long before they were to actually pull a trigger or press a button.
In the end, the junior senator from Kentucky and his ilk claim to have risen in defense of the Fifth Amendment, but instead they've given the rest of us a glimpse into the bizarre world many Libertarians inhabit.
It's a world where conspiracy theories abound, Federal Reserve bankers are on par with al-Qaeda, and the president is an Orwellian Big Brother -- the sort of stuff that attracts a rather odd bunch. For as the Wall Street Journal fittingly suggests, "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."
I witnessed these kids in action at the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference when I accompanied my former boss Donald Rumsfeld, who received the Defender of the Constitution award from his friend, Dick Cheney. A gaggle of Libertarian Paulites behaved as if they were at a professional wrestling bout and shouted obscenities at the two men -- some were moved to call them "war criminals."
Paul's filibuster was about as serious as the accusations hurled at Rumsfeld and Cheney, and it in fact exposed Rand as an acolyte of his father, Ron. During Rand's rant, he condemned his critics as those who "see perpetual war, perpetual war without geographic limits, and they see the battlefield here, so they want the laws of war to apply not only there but here." This is "martial law," Paul argued.
Instead, he said, "if a person is sitting in a cafe in Houston, they do get Miranda rights, they do get accused of a crime, they do get a jury of their peers." In suggesting that Awlaki or Hasan or Shahzad are simply criminals deserving to be Mirandized, the Paul boys gravely misunderstand everything about post-9/11 warfare.
Rand and Ron don't seem to understand the significance of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism. The moment American Airlines flight 11 plunged into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, it was made tragically clear that warfare will likely never again be about superpower versus superpower or nation state versus nation state. Warfare is now asymmetric, where non-state actors carry out acts of war in a global battlefield. American citizens become non-state actors and enemy combatants when they commit treason and, in this particular case, take up jihad in the homeland.
This new asymmetric warfare is precisely why former Senator Joe Lieberman's Enemy Expatriation Act is so important. If passed, it would strip United States citizens of their rights if they were found to be "providing material support or resources to a Foreign Terrorist Organization, as designated by the secretary of state, or actively engaging in hostilities against the United States or its allies." A Libertarian's worst nightmare, some might say.
Though if Paul and his Libertarian kids got their way, the nightmare of September 11 could be all too real once again.
