home to america, that america is a battlefield, and that the laws of war come home. but the laws of war don t involve due process, and can t. and i don t think they should. so, i don t want the law of war to be the law of america, because that would mean that we would be giving up on the bill of rights. on a slightly lighter note, you did get some support and you got some support from the democratic side. democratic senator ron wyden spoke up and defended you. senator paul, even majority leader harry reid had some praise for you and here is that. i ve been involved in a few filibust filibusters, as rand paul has, as rand paul did yesterday. and what i ve learned from my experiences, with talking filibusters, is this. to succeed, you need strong convictions, but also a strong bladder. it s obvious, senator paul has both. i have to say, i was
got to have filibuster reform. we ve got to change the way we do business and we ve got to move in such a way so that we can deal with the agenda he s laying out and which we may modify some but it s important that we get to that agenda. not sit around in a bunch of filibust filibusters. i think what the senator said is important. it s also about reading between the lines of what he says. is he out giving a speech on filibuster reform every day? no. i don t have any data but i don t think think 99% of the people in this country know what filibuster or any of this is. the question is, if this keeps moving and hopefully it does, can the president get out and talk about what this means for immigration in what it means for guns? translate to people understand? that s the reason that commercial was very effective and that should be the message around this. from where i sit and i m sort of the minority on the. i m of the belief 50 years from now people will look back and the thing will c
today. so there are folks reluctant to change them saying the better thing is to restore the social contrast. quite frankly, we ve tried that. the minority leader and the democratic leader worked out a gentleman s agreement two years ago. it failed utterly. it s just clear, we re not in the same world. sir, how do you define failure? well, we failed in the sense that it was supposed to eliminate these huge number of filibusters and allow us to get an agenda on the floor. no longer have the blocking of bills before we get to the floor and to greatly expedite nominations, neither of those happened. if anything, we had more filibust filibusters. it simply wasn t possible as a gentleman s agreement among leaders. realize, they re constrained by the fact that they can only persuade members of their caucus. they can t compel members of their caucus to stand aside and let things hit the floor. it only takes one senator to object to throw you into this super majority requirement.
work, using the rate on bin ladin and the flag in his office with the signatures of the seals i thought was a very powerful moment. it was very important, i think most of all, the country needed that tonight. we have seen a record number of filibust filibusters, we have seen this town unable to come to some conclusion on big issues because of the political divide in the country. tonight the president took arguably the biggest story in the world in the last year, and talked about the people who were involved in the mission, and talked about their sacrifice. they didn t care if they were republican or democrat. they didn t care about ideology, they cared about not i, but we and team. and i think the congress needed to hear that tonight. and the president called out the congress tonight on a couple different occasions, saying you re pretty much out of step with the rest of the country. they agree on things across america, you guys can t agree on