Sen. Rand Paul launched into an old-fashioned filibuster on the Senate floor Wednesday as he tried to hold up the nomination of John Brennan for CIA director over concerns about the president’s authority to kill Americans with drones. Paul, R-Ky., is one of several lawmakers – on both sides of the aisle – who has raised concerns about the legal justification for launching drone strikes against Americans overseas. But Paul took to the floor after receiving a statement from Attorney General Eric Holder that creaked open the door to the possibility of using a drone to kill an American inside the United States.
“To allow one man to accuse you in secret -- you never get notified you've been accused,” Paul said on the floor. “Your notification is the buzz of propellers on the drone as it flies overhead in the seconds before you're killed. Is that what we really want from our government?”
Paul said he’d be raising the same complaints under a Republican president.
“No one politician should be allowed to judge the guilt, to charge an individual, to judge the guilt of an individual and to execute an individual. It goes against everything that we fundamentally believe in our country,” he said.
Paul, who started speaking shortly before noon, said he will filibuster the nomination “until I can no longer speak.”
This kind of filibuster is rare – typically, senators “filibuster” by refusing to grant the majority the 60 votes needed to proceed to a final vote on certain bills.
Paul, though, said he wanted to raise the “alarm” about the drone issue.
He spoke after receiving letters from Holder on drone authority.
In one letter, Holder said the U.S. has never carried out a drone strike against one of its citizens on American soil, and called a situation where such a strike may occur "entirely hypothetical" and "unlikely to occur."
However, Holder did not entirely rule out that such a scenario may occur in the future, and indicated that such a strike would be legal under the Constitution.
“It is possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate under the Constitution and applicable laws of the United States for the president to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States," Holder said.
Holder said "catastrophic" attacks such as the Sept. 11 attacks or the attack on Pearl Harbor are examples of circumstances where the president could conceivably feel such an action is necessary.
Testifying on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Holder agreed that it would be unconstitutional to use a drone on American soil against a U.S. citizen and suspected terrorist who did not pose an imminent threat.
Brennan has been a staunch supporter of the administration’s drone program. But, after members of the Senate Intelligence Committee extracted key documents on the program from the administration, the panel on Tuesday voted 12-3 to approve the nomination.
Senate leaders were hoping to hold a floor vote on the nomination as early as Wednesday.