#StandWithRand? How Rand Paul's 13-hour filibuster scrambled the American political spectrum.

• Author: Mangu-Ward, Katherine

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ON WEDNESDAY, March 6, at 11:47 a.m., Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) took the floor in the United States Senate to register his concerns about President Barack Obama's nominee for CIA director, John Brennan.

"I will speak as long as it takes," Paul began, "until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important, that your rights to trial by jury are precious, that no American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a court." Paul spoke all night and into the next day. When he finally yielded the floor 13 hours later, partisans of all stripes awoke to find themselves spooning with some very strange bedfellows.

On the left, former Obama administration green czar Van Jones hailed Paul as a "hero," while Salon's Adele M. Stan complained bitterly about "bro-gressives' love affair" with "the racist, misogynistic Kentucky senator." On the right, neoconservative commentator Charles Krauthammer called the filibuster "a stroke of political genius" while Powerline's Paul Mirengoff warned that "Paul is dead and dangerously wrong about the war on terror, just as his father is."

This scrambling of traditional partisan positions was touched off by a letter Paul received just a few days earlier, an unsatisfying answer to his queries about executive power from Attorney General Eric Holder. "It is possible, I suppose," Holder wrote, "to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate under the Constitution and applicable laws of the United States for the President to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States."

As Paul explained during his filibuster, "When I asked the president, 'Can you kill an American on American soil,' it should have been an easy answer. It's an easy question. It should have been a resounding and unequivocal, 'no.'"

Paul's extemporizing on everything from the overseas drone strike on terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki's 16-year-old American son to the radical rhetoric of the abolitionist Lysander Spooner...