Throughout the past five years, the administration has been tight-lipped and grudging in its discussion of the law and the Constitution as it applies to our new war-fighting technology. The "Paulibuster" may represent a last chance to broaden the discussion and confront the very real dangers drone warfare represents.

Right now the domestic dialogue focuses entirely on one narrow though important question: When can the U.S. target an American citizen abroad for a lethal drone strike? This focus is unhelpful. From what we know today, the U.S. has done this only once since it began arming drones a decade ago. The real danger is not spillover from the drone war onto an occasional American; it is the lawless context within which the entire drone war seems to operate.

Drones, as I have argued before, represent a change in war-fighting technology that leaves existing law gasping to keep up. In legal terms, there's no difference between targeting a perceived enemy abroad with a drone and doing so by sending in SEAL Team Six. But that's a flaw in the law, which ordinarily proceeds backwards, drawing its analysis from historic events. (Consider, for example, that discussions of how Congress could regulate drone warfare often start with the 1804 case of Little v. Barreme, in which the Supreme Court held that President John Adams had no power to order seizure of neutral vessels sailing from a French port when Congress had only authorized him to seize vessels sailing to French ports.)

The U.S. should ask the Security Council to consider whether we need a multilateral treaty on drone warfare. Given how cheap and safe they are, Kim Jong Un and Al Shabaab will soon be ordering them from Amazon.

Drones are different from other modes of warfare because of their cheapness, their deniability, and the fact that they can be deployed to destroy enemy targets with little or no risk to American personnel. From what we know, the drone program is becoming an institution within the national-security apparatus, with a growing air fleet, hundreds of earth-bound pilots, and a shadowy official chain of command involving the Pentagon, the CIA, and the White House. Unless we act quickly, the institution itself will begin the set the rules; and there's no reason to believe that it will restrict its own operations any more than other secret, unchecked bureaucracies do -- that is to say, hardly at all.

One doesn't have to be Rand Paul to see that this administration's approach to public discussion of the new reality has been grudging at best and disingenuous at worst. Paul's filibuster was sparked by a letter he received from Attorney General Eric Holder Monday. Paul had asked Holder whether the administration had authority to use a drone strike against a U.S. citizen on American soil. Holder wrote that the question is "entirely hypothetical [and] unlikely to occur." He then went on to answer,

It is possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate under the Constitution to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States. For example, the President could conceivably have no choice to use such force if necessary to protect the homeland in the circumstance of a catastrophic attack like the ones suffered on December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001. Were such an emergency to arise, I would examine the particular facts and circumstances before advising the President on the scope of his authority.

The letter clearly doesn't say anything like what Paul says it says. Read it carefully; it doesn't even say that the government might have power to strike an American citizen at all. At a hearing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday, Holder told Senator Ted Cruz that the dreaded café strike would not be constitutional. But that statement came only after much back and forth about Holder's initial statement that it would not be "appropriate." Finally, Holder explained, "Translate my 'appropriate' to 'no.' I thought I was saying 'no.' All right? 'No.'"