“Make me proud today, Secretary Kerry,” Senator Rand Paul said toward the end of more than three hours of Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on whether to authorize President Obama to use military force against Syria. Paul wanted Kerry to say that if Congress voted no—“which is unlikely”—the White House “wouldn’t go forward with the war.” Otherwise, he said, “you’re making a joke of us. You’re making us into theatre. And so we play constitutional theatre for the President.” (Despite what Paul told Kerry, it’s not clear that there are the votes to get a resolution through Congress, even though House Speaker John Boehner said on Tuesday that he’d support it, as did Nancy Pelosi, and Hillary Clinton, for that matter.) Meanwhile, his colleague John McCain, who complained that there wasn’t enough of a war planned, had been caught on camera playing poker on his iPhone.

There was something stunted about the testimony from Kerry, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, and General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. If it was a piece of theatre, it was one clearly still in workshop, with only the roughest notion of how the last act would end—or even how its authors wanted it to end, and what the basic motivations of the characters might be. Kerry, who did most of the talking, came with reassurances on the quality of the intelligence showing that the Assad régime had used chemical weapons, but with little more than impressionistic notions and sweeping historical admonitions when asked what would happen after the United States launched air strikes. When pressed, quite reasonably, by Senator Tom Udall, who said that he agreed that Assad had done something “horrific” but wanted to know more about diplomacy and the possibility of escalation, Kerry compared the present moment to the Holocaust, and not going along with strikes to turning away Jewish refugees. He explained to Paul that he had no idea what Obama would do if the authorization failed—that the President hadn’t told him. Earlier in the hearing, he’d said the same thing to Senator Jeff Flake, adding,

But I’ll tell you what will happen, where it matters, in Pyongyang, in Tehran, in Damascus—folks will stand up and celebrate. And in a lot of other capitals in parts of the world, people will scratch their heads and sign a sort of condolence for the loss of America’s willingness to stand up and make itself felt where it makes a difference to the world.

There is nothing wrong with making sweeping moral arguments. But they should be openers of debates rather than closers. The final language of an authorization, several of the senators made clear, will not be the same as the President’s—on Tuesday evening, the Washington Post reported, the committee had a new draft, giving the President up to ninety days of action, and there are others being passed among House members—and they get to reserve the right to vote no without being called North Korean fellow-travellers. That is apart from the question of whether we care that people in countries without democratic instruments “scratch their heads” when we don’t let a President do whatever he wants.

If there is one thing that the hearings are showing, it is that the Administration has a great deal of work to do in constructing the strategic and logical framework for military action. (This is one reason why it was a good idea to go to Congress.) Senator after senator asked if what the President planned to do about chemical weapons would also help the rebels, and whether it should. They got confused answers—an acknowledgment from Kerry that there might be “downstream” benefits; assertions that the opposition was on the whole getting more moderate and “more defined by its adherence to some, you know, democratic process and to an all-inclusive, minority-protecting constitution,” never mind that one of the groups was an Al Qaeda affiliate. Mostly, Kerry seemed to want the senators to put the question of régime-change entirely out of their minds for the purposes of this vote, and to think about the American policy that Assad should step down as being on a different “track.” At one point, when Dempsey was asked about how limited American air strikes might change the direction of Syria’s civil war, he said, “I have never been told to change the momentum. I have been told to degrade capability.”

What did seem to worry Kerry was that something he said early in the hearing might resonate. As he put it, “I want to come back to it because I don’t want anybody misinterpreting.” He had been asked why the President’s suggested draft for an authorization to use force didn’t say that there would be no “boots on the ground.” (The new Senate version does, at least when it comes to “combat operations.”) Those boots weren’t contemplated, Kerry said: