When the madness began to lift: Rand Paul's historic filibuster may have changed American politics.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: From the Top

THE 2004 Republican National Convention, held in New York City as close as possible to the three-year anniversary of the day the World Trade Center was pulverized by terrorists, was a three-day festival of chest-thumping snarls directed at anyone who'd dare mention the concepts of civil liberties or executive branch restraint.

"Which leader is it today that has the vision, the willpower, and, yes, the backbone to best protect my family?" asked turncoat Sen. Zell Miller (D-Ga.), in the most celebrated of the convention's speeches. "Sen. Kerry has made it clear that he would use military force only if approved by the United Nations. Kerry would let Paris decide when America needs defending. I want Bush to decide!"

Conservatism was united in wanting President George W. Bush to be the sole decider on all matters related to a massive, open-ended effort to play "offense, not defense" in the War on Terror. And it was a popular message among non-conservatives, as evidenced by the results of the 2004 election. Even self-described libertarians at the time were busy dreaming up hypothetical ticking time-bomb scenarios to justify the heretofore beyond-the-pale use of torture.

For those of us who oppose torture, who reckon that the proper purpose of a military is defense, and who believe that Lord Acton's "power corrupts" insight can also apply to American armed forces, no matter how noble-sounding the cause, the Republican Convention, and the era surrounding it, was a kind of fever dream.

And the terror sweats hardly stopped with the 2008 Republican nomination of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).Yes, McCain was against torture, having had his legs and shoulders repeatedly smashed by the Viet Cong. But his foreign policy and his vision of unshackled executive power were the most robustly interventionist since the final presidential candidacy of his hero, Teddy Roosevelt.

McCain advocated "rogue-state rollback," a doctrine of supporting rebels against tyrants and then treating them like full military allies should the dictator crack down. He thought it was funny to re-imagine the Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann" as "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" He bashed libertarians and individualists and "isolationists" at every turn, while lauding Roosevelt for "liberally interpreting the constitutional authority of the office to redress the imbalance of power between the executive and legislative branches."

You might have thought that McCain's defeat at the hands of a...