FOR 12 glorious hours, all American conservatives of good conscience were "Rand Paul Republicans" this week. So says the online army that is still in battle formation, long after the tea party-backed senator from Kentucky ended his talking filibuster of the new CIA head's confirmation. Mr Paul stood down after receiving a two-sentence assurance from Eric Holder, the attorney-general, that President Barack Obama does not have the authority to use a "weaponised drone" to kill an American citizen on American soil who is not engaged in combat. The debate over whether Mr Paul was asking a silly question has been well covered. The Wall Street Journalsaid the senator "needs to do more than pull political stunts that fire up impressionable libertarian kids". But a raft of Senate colleagues insisted that the question cannot have been foolish, because it took the Obama administration so long to answer it. Marco Rubio of Florida, a man elected with tea-party help, said, "If it’s such a silly question, why couldn’t you just dismiss it quickly with a very straightforward answer?" As it happens, I think that Mr Paul's question, in its extreme narrowness (can the American president kill American citizens in America with a drone?) was something of a cheap stunt, embraced online by those already primed to think Mr Obama a tryant determined to trample on the rights of free-born Americans. That is a shame, because the drone programme and the wider war on terror throw up more serious questions worthy of Senate scrutiny and (why not?) a dramatic talking filibuster.

There is the question of the desperately slender, and fraying, legal authority that underpins much of the war on terror. From drone strikes in Pakistan or Yemen to continued detentions in Guantánamo Bay, the legal base of too many American actions remains a short paragraph passed by a joint resolution of Congress three days after the September 11th attacks. That resolution, the Authorisation for Use of Military Force, is causing a growing number of headaches, as the Washington Post pointed out this week, because it grants sweeping powers to go after groups or individuals linked to the September 11th attacks, but says nothing about unrelated extremist groups that have popped up since then. Inside government, this threadbare legal basis causes real angst, as several senior officials have admitted to me in interviews.

Then there is the question of whether the new CIA chief, John Brennan, or the White House, will support the release of any part of a 6,000-page report by the Senate Intelligence Committee on the detention and interrogation policies of the past 12 years. Mr Brennan, during confirmation hearings, said that he had been surprised and disturbed by some of the contents of the report, which apparently says that the CIA's handling of terror suspects was mismanaged and that officials misled Congress about how much useful information was obtained from interrogations.

Those questions, surely, would have been worthier foundations on which to build a 12-hour filibuster.

But to me what is really dismaying about Mr Paul's filibuster is not how it sprang to life, but how it ended. The senator claimed that Mr Holder's letter amounted to a great "victory", though all it really said was: ok, we can confirm that your wild conspiracy theory is indeed wild and a conspiracy theory. The senator tried to suggest on Fox News that he had somehow succeeded in limiting presidential power, and certainly that is what many of his supporters are saying. In Mr Paul's words:

It's a great victory because we've been asking a question of the president, and this is a question that limits the presidential power. Presidents, Republican and Democrat, they don't want to limit their power, so this was the body of the Senate saying to the president, Are you going to obey the constitution?

But presidents already swear an oath to uphold the constitution. A senator who uses his power to show that a president has broken that oath has done a great and historic service to his country. But Mr Paul did not do that. His question to Mr Holder was, in effect: do you think the president has the right to flout the constitution? And the administration replied: no. That is not oversight, that's heckling.

Not content with that, Mr Paul raced around giving interviews hinting that the whole process had bolstered his claims to run for the Republican nomination in 2016, by showing how he could reach out from the traditional conservative base to more libertarian or plain ornery bits of the country (he cited New England, where it is true he has a strong following, notably in such leave-me-alone places as Maine and New Hampshire).

Mr Paul told Politico:

I think there is somehow a middle ground between what is maybe more pure libertarianism and what is more traditional, conservatism, and I think somewhere in between, there is a role as long as that person can somehow bring about an expansion of the party.

And that idea of Mr Paul as a unifier able to bring together libertarian and small-government fiscal conservatives has taken off.

The tea-party movement, which knows all about the trickiness of uniting social conservatives and libertarians under an anti-government banner, jumped on the chance to denounce Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, two older-school national-security Republicans willing to do deals across party lines in the interest of governing. FreedomWorks, a group which has funded primary challenges against Republicans it thinks insufficiently flinty, urged activists to weigh in after Mr McCain and Mr Graham criticised the Paul filibuster (and compounded their sin by discussing possible budget deals with Mr Obama over dinner).

Here is Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee (who encouraged senators to help Mr Paul in the chamber during his marathon), praising the filibuster to the Des Moines Register and playing down the divisions Mr Paul had exposed:



I think it was completely awesome. I was excited about it myself. I couldn’t go to bed. I’m still excited about it... You know why I’m excited about it? I think our party needs some unity sometimes, and it’s not easy not having the White House, and sometimes you’ve got to scrap and claw for issues that can unify a party—now [it wasn’t] total unity. But this was a great issue in standing up against the president and asking some simple, important questions, and I was happy to see so many other senators support Mr. Paul.

Here is Nick Gillespie of Reason, a libertarian magazine:

[W]hat was most bracing and ultimately powerful thing about the filibuster was that none of the speakers exempted the Republican Party or former President George W. Bush, whose aggrandized view of executive power still roils the sleep of the Founding Fathers, from withering criticism and scrutiny. How else to explain that hard-left groups such as Code Pink were proud to #standwithrand yesterday on Twitter?... The filibuster succeeded precisely because it wasn't a cheap partisan ploy but because the substance under discussion—why won't the president of the United States, his attorney general, and his nominee to head the CIA explain their views on limits to their power?—transcends anything so banal or ephemeral as party affiliation or ideological score-settling

And here is the word from Iowa, via Politico:

“I don’t think you can underestimate how big of a moment this was. If the Iowa Caucuses were tomorrow, he would win in a landslide,” said conservative talk radio host Steve Deace, who lives in Iowa. “Imagine taking what Scott Walker did in Wisconsin and combining it with what Mike Huckabee did with Chick-fil-A, that’s how big this is.”

Big? The problem with Mr Paul's filibuster was that it was small. He is a man of tender conscience with some legitimate concerns about the legal mess that is the war on terror. But though he may claim, as here to Fox News, that he has clarified those questions, he has not. In Mr Paul's own words, this was why he set out to filibuster Mr Brennan:

The main reason for asking this question was, we have drone strikes overseas where people are being killed who are not actively engaged in combat. Now, they may be bad people, but they're not actively engaged in combat. I don't think in America, if you're in a cafe, if you're e-mailing somebody, even if you're conspiring, that you should be summarily killed. You should be arrested if they think you're guilty of something. You should get a trial and an attorney and all the due process. In America, we do have the Bill of Rights. In fact, that's what our soldiers are fighting for. So I don't think we should give that up to say, Oh, the whole world is a zone of war, and therefore, you can be named an enemy combatant and wafted off to prison somewhere.

In his own terms, then, he failed. He secured no answers at all about the legality of drone strikes overseas (which are, let us not forget, the only drone strikes to have ever happened, outside the feverish imaginations of the black-helicopters crowd). Nor did he extract any information from the government about the wider legality of that post September 11th assertion of world-wide war powers. Mr Paul's filibuster was a waste of his own fine conscience.

So why are conservatives from Mr Rubio to Mr Preibus to Mr Deace in Iowa so happy about the filibuster? Because they have spent the months since last November's election feeling sad, and he made them feel happier about themselves.

Just read the line from Mr Deace, the talk-show host, carefully. He compares Mr Paul's filibuster to a tangible policy victory (the legal curbs on trade unions passed by Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, despite ferocious local opposition), but also to a moment of meaningless feel-good navel-gazing for social conservatives (the online campaign by Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and failed presidential candidate, to rally support for the Chik-fil-A fast-food chain after its boss gave an interview setting out his objections, as a Christian, to gay marriage). Whether you agree with Mr Walker or Mr Huckabee, or with neither of them, it is an objective political fact that one of them achieved something important and one inspired social conservatives to queue for chicken sandwiches last August, a moment that cheered up lots of Republicans and made them feel united, but did precisely nothing to help win the White House or the Senate.

The frenzy around Rand Paul this week says less about Mr Paul than it does about the need of conservatives to reassure themselves that they are a mass movement, capable of attracting majority support from mainstream America. Alas for conservatives, Mr Paul did not really prove that.

When polled about the sort of drone strikes that take place in the real world, 64% of Americans told a WSJ/NBC poll last month that they support targeted assassinations of al-Qaeda suspects abroad—ie, they do not share Mr Paul's qualms. It was only when polled by Reason with a frankly leading question, about whether they feared the government abusing its power as it used drones to kill American citizens accused of being terrorists, that a majority said yes.

There is an urgent need for better oversight of America's war on terror. Conservatives are well placed to provide that oversight, because most Democrats are disinclined to criticise Mr Obama in public over his use of drones, secret detentions and intelligence sharing with legally dodgy foreign agencies. If done properly, such oversight would be hard work and politically risky, because many ordinary Americans seem not that fussed about vapourising suspected Islamic extremists in far-away countries. Ignore the praise for Mr Paul this week. He has proved nothing about the right's appetite for such hard, risky work, and shown instead a movement excited by any chance to rally round a popular cause, and feel good about itself.

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