Rand Paul paints the Senate Democrats into a corner

From The Humble Libertarian blog:

So far I've been extremely impressed with Senator Rand Paul, not only for his stalwart commitment to liberty and sanity in public policy, but for his hilarious trolling of Senate legislators in order to advance these principles and demonstrate that most legislators only pay lip service to them, like when Rand attached an amendment to a bill calling on Senators to adopt Barack Obama's own words as a presidential candidate to describe the "sense of the Senate" on his recent intervention into Libya:

"The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation."

Paul's office said:

"...the measure aims to put the Senate on record affirming Congress as the body with constitutional authority on matters of war."

This left Senate Democrats with the impolitic choice of opposing the President's illegal war in Libya, or standing with the President while angering antiwar Democrats and essentially implying that the President does have the power to unilaterally authorize military action-- something that sounds more like a Bush-era neocon doctrine than something honest "liberals" (in the modern sense of that word) would support.


Read the rest of the article, which recounts a similar episode from 1971 Texas, when a legislator got the whole legislature to unanimously pass a bill lauding the Boston Strangler...