“Dear Senator Paul,” Attorney General Eric Holder began, in a letter he sent to Rand Paul this morning. Paul might have read it with tired eyes, since he’d spent almost thirteen hours yesterday filibustering the nomination of John Brennan as director of the C.I.A. He had said Holder’s name many times in those hours. But the letter would not have required much focus: it reads, in its entirety,

It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: “Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?” The answer to that question is no. Sincerely, Eric H. Holder, Jr.

Was that so hard? Paul and others had asked every which way for a straight answer. (This is not really, as Holder writes, “an additional question.”) They got obfuscation and, worse, a letter from Holder, which I wrote about this morning, that placed the killing of some Americans on American soil, by some means, at the President’s sole discretion, a distinct possibility. So this letter is some sort of progress.

Paul saw it that way. “Through the advise and consent process, I’ve got an important answer,” he told the Washington Post. He said he was happy: “I’ve kind of won my battle.”

He also, the Times reported, may have opened a rift in the G.O.P., between executive-power skeptics and those who like Presidents having drones without much oversight. The paper quoted John McCain, who disapproved of a Paul analogy involving Jane Fonda, and Senator Lindsey Graham, who asked, “What are we up to here?”

Parsers will wonder why Holder specified a “weaponized drone,” and if other means have a different legal status. That might be a question for the future attorneys general who look at the discussions of their predecessors for guidance. (That is a slightly mortifying thought.) It seems more likely that Holder, as he writes “weaponized drones,” is rhetorically rolling his eyes, and trying to make the question itself seem extreme—as if to say, Just look at what I have to put up with. If so, that is wrongheaded. Is it that Holder can't imagine using a drone in Ohio himself, and so can't see the precedents in the papers he passes around? Paul’s questions have been proper and necessary. This letter is a toehold of constitutionality, but it shouldn’t be the last one. There are all sorts of questions: about Americans abroad, what counts as “combat,” that six-thousand-page classified torture report, and even, perhaps, about the many people who have died in drone attacks who aren’t Americans at all.

Meanwhile, Thursday afternoon, the Senate confirmed Brennan, 63 to 34. Paul voted against him.

Senator Rand Paul Second Letter by tpmdocs

Photograph by Bill Clark/Getty.