fair treatment. senator rand paul told howard fineman at the huffington post today his southern avenger staffer s earlier work was just a form of youthful showmanship. the senator asks rhetorically, writing about how the confederacy needed to rise again. and secede from the nation. and then within a year of that, rand paul had him on staff on the payroll writing rand paul s book. and now that rand paul is getting asked about it, senator paul says the whole secessionist neoconfederacy thing was a youthful indiscretion which this 39-year-old put down months before rand paul hired him.
order they decide to do it. something like a discharge position. who knows. it could marinate for months and suddenly there be enough pressure and republicans realize that they are in enough trouble that they absolutely have to do something along those lines, but i think that at this point, we can t answer that question definitively. going i realize the discharge petition idea is seen as a crazy pipe dream. i will say we keep hearing from the republicans there s a group of about three dozen republicans among the 230 whatever who actually won t call themselves moderates but are at least thinking in practical terms. on this issue it would seem they re really aligned with the big money sort of bigwigs with the republican party saying immigration reform is the kind of thing the republican party has to do to survive electorally. couldn t john boehner just fake it? and essentially allow a coup of the relatively safe seat republicans, get a lot of outside support, outside money from the p
carrier. they do things like standing watch and charting the ship s course and making meals in the galley. they work on something they call micromini repair. micromini repair. if something goes wrong with an electrical something onboard, they make the means up to fix it themselves. and for the last couple of years some of the sailors have been working on a brand new thing that no one has ever done before. it is this thing. the x-47b which is an experimental unmanned flying drone that is the size of a full-sized fighter jet. a navy team has been trying to invent essentially and perfect this aircraft that could take off and land at sea with no pilot using the deck of the u.s.s. george h.w. bush. two years ago this month they tested the software that would run the drone. they used that software to land a fighter plane on one of their sister ships, even though that one wasn t a drone. that was a real plane with a pilot onboard just in case something was wrong, even though
no place for the kooks at the table. and this is nutty stuff. this birther nut, who has been for years, delegitimatize the president of the united states. no serious republican presidential candidate should be comfortable getting up on the stage with them. and it happened over and over. and the republican party has suffered from it over the last years. great to have you here. i have to tell you the thing you have to know about tomorrow s news. and so get your little calendar thing out. all business purchases.
but there is another way to bring something up on the house floor if the speaker can t get it together, and that is to get a majority of the house to sign a discharge petition that says, we would like to vote on this matter. that s all you need. you just need a majority, need 218 people to say we want to vote on it and it doesn t matter if the speaker can t stop punching himself in the face long enough to say, okay, it just happens. if you got every democrat to sign that thing which is not inconceivable, that would be 201 of the 218. you d only need 17 republicans to go along. 17 out of the more than 230 house republicans in a republican party that is absolutely convinced it must find a way to say yes to immigration reform. all you need is 17 republicans. that s 7% of the house republican caucus. that s all you d need. there are definitely 17 republicans who would vote yes if this thing got to the floor. probably many more than that. if somebody organized an effort, that really would b