CIA director:
John Brennan is confirmed by the Senate to lead the spy agency after the White House states the president has limits on drone use against U.S. terror suspects on U.S. soil.
WASHINGTON — The Senate confirmed John Brennan to be CIA director Thursday after the Obama administration bowed to demands from Republicans blocking the nomination and stated explicitly that there are limits on the president’s power to use drones against U.S. terror suspects on American soil.
The 63-34 vote came after Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky concluded an old-style filibuster, stretching past midnight, that was aimed at extracting an answer from the administration before the nomination could go forward.
Still, Brennan won some GOP support. Thirteen Republicans voted with 49 Democrats and one independent to promote President Barack Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser to the top job at the nation’s spy agency.
He will replace Michael Morell, acting director since November, when the previous CIA chief, David Petraeus, resigned after acknowledging an affair with his biographer.
Paul, who had held the Senate floor for almost 13 hours, yielded to an 81-16 vote to end the filibuster after receiving a one-paragraph letter from Attorney General Eric Holder.
“It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: ‘Does the presi- dent have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?’ ” Holder wrote. “The answer to that question is no.”
“We worked very hard on a constitutional question to get an answer from the president,” Paul said after voting against Brennan. “It may have been a little harder than we wish it had been, but in the end I think it was a good, healthy debate.”
However, Paul’s stand on the Brennan nomination and insistence that the Obama administration explain its controversial drone program exposed a deep split among Senate Republicans, pitting leader Mitch McConnell, libertarians and tea partyers against military hawks such as John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
McConnell, who congratulated his fellow Kentuckian, Paul, for his “tenacity and for his conviction,” said in Senate remarks Thursday that “the United States military no more has the right to kill a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil who is not a combatant with an armed, unmanned aerial vehicle than it does with an M-16.”
But McCain, R-Ariz., derided Paul’s suggestion during his talkathon that, under a policy like Obama’s, the government could have used missiles to kill actress Jane Fonda, who traveled to North Vietnam during the height of the Vietnam war to show her opposition to the war.
“To somehow allege or infer that the president of the United States is going to kill somebody like Jane Fonda or somebody who disagrees with the policies is a stretch of imagination which is, frankly, ridiculous,” said McCain, a Vietnam veteran and former prisoner of war.
Graham expressed incredulity that Republicans would criticize Obama on a policy that Republican President George W. Bush also used in the terror war.
“People are astonished that President Obama is doing many of the things that President Bush did,” Graham said. “I’m not astonished. I congratulate him for having the good judgment to understand we’re at war. And to my party, I’m a bit disappointed that you no longer apparently think we’re at war.”
Graham, initially a “no” vote against Brennan, told reporters that the confirmation fight had become a referendum on the drone program and he planned to back the president’s nominee.