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Filifinished: Rand Paul Yields The Floor After Nearly 13 Hours With Demand For Answer From Obama About Domestic Drone Assassination



Mar 7, 2013 No Comments ›› Spit Stixx

Excerpted from The Daily Caller: As Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul staged a dramatic, rare speaking filibuster to protest President Barack Obama’s apparent belief that he has the constitutional authority to assassinate American citizens within the United States, citizens also began demanding a response from the White House though the administration’s online “We the People” petition website.

Paul yielded the Senate floor to a round of applause at approximately 12:39 a.m. EST on Thursday morning, ending his nearly-13 hour filibuster of the Senate’s confirmation vote of White House adviser John Brennan to be the director of the CIA.

A petition echoing Paul’s request, however, was started on the White House website late Wednesday evening, and rapidly gained traction.

“Mr. President,” the petition begins. ”We the people request that you respond to Senator Rand Paul and the citizens of America on the issue of drone strikes on US soil with the potential to kill US citizens without a trial. … We request that you respect our freedoms and our rights as US citizens.”

“Mr. President, as our elected leader, you are accountable to the people and so we ask that you address this important issue”, it adds, signing off ”respectfully” under the name “A Citizen of the United States of America.”

The petition gathered more than 1,300 signatures just hours after going live, and reached over 2,000 signatures by 1:30 a.m. on Thursday.

By the administration’s own rules, the White House is required to respond to petitions that cross a signature threshold of 100,000 signatures within 30 days.

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Excerpted from Human Events: Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) spent Wednesday afternoon waging a one-man filibuster against President Obama’s nominee for CIA director, John Brennan. And he’s doing it the old-fashioned Mr. Smith Goes to Washington way: by holding the floor and talking for hours. He’s still going at the time of this writing, coming up on 1:30 PM Eastern Standard Time.

“I will speak until I can no longer speak,” vowed Senator Paul, who was also forced to concede that “I can’t talk forever.” Where’s Hugo Chavez when you really need him? That guy could talk forever.

Paul is particularly concerned about the use of drone strikes to kill terrorists in various hot spots around the world. He wants to make sure the terms “terrorist” and “hot spot” are not re-defined to mean American citizens on U.S. soil, and as the Washington Times reports, he’s not comfortable with the answers he’s been getting:

“I will speak today until the president responds and says, ‘No, we won’t kill Americans in cafes. No, we won’t kill you at home at night,’” Mr. Paul said.

Just hours earlier, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. testified to a Senate committee that he believed it would be illegal for the government to kill an American who did not pose an imminent threat to security.

But he could not rule out the use of drones on American soil altogether, saying only that he doubted it would happen because it’s easier to capture people here.

Oh, well, heck, what’s the big deal then? By the way, isn’t this the same Administration that says capturing illegal aliens is virtually impossible, even though there are millions of them? And cracking down on the widespread defrauding of government programs is a Herculean task? But it’s so easy to capture terrorists on U.S. soil that it’s entirely possible we’ll never have to unleash the killbots on them. You can trust Eric Holder – he’s the guy that never reads his email, and was therefore unaware that his Justice Department was running thousands of guns to Mexican drug lords, many of which have yet to be recovered, because they haven’t turned up at a murder scene yet.

Paul explained his filibuster plans to the Washington Post this morning:

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