So what was the REAL reason Sen. Rand Paul ended his political-star-making, old-fashioned, Jimmy Stewart-like talking filibuster? Was the the call of the political pro: did he feel he made his point? Actually, Salon reports, it was the call of nature:
Sen. Rand Paul ended his old-school Mr. Smith-style talking filibuster at around 12:30 a.m. this morning, after 12 hours and 52 minutes on the Senate floor. During that time the Kentucky Republican had a little help from his friends, with several of his colleagues joining him in the chamber to ask him questions—something that was allowed under Senate rules as long as Paul did not formally yield the floor and remained standing at his desk. Such breaks probably allowed Paul’s voice to hold out a little longer than it would have normally, but they couldn’t postpone nature’s inevitable call. In the end, in the words of the New York Times, that meant the filibuster became “less a standoff between the senator from Kentucky and the administration than a battle between Mr. Paul and his own bladder.” Obviously, that’s a battle that Paul could not win.
“I would try to go another 12 hours and try to break Strom Thurmond’s record, but there are some limits to filibustering and I am going to have to go take care of one of those here,” Paul said as he brought things to an end, about 11 and a half hours short of Thurmond’s 24-hour-and-18-minute filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1957. (As Vanity Fair’s Juli Weiner put it this morning: “In the end, Rand Paul did not hate U.S.-citizen-targeted drone strikes as much as Strom Thurmond hated the idea of black people voting.”
So it was the bladder that made Paul end the filibuster that ended with him being flushed with imagery victory.
UPDATE: While Rand Paul is being praised for reviving the old, style filibuster in many often surprising quarters, others are cautioning not so fast on ignoring other parts of his belief system.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.