I batted 1.000 for that cycle, but it was easy. In 2016, Republicans won’t be facing a Democratic incumbent, so somebody has a shot. I recently wrote that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie will never be president, due to his out-of-control anger issues, but candidly, I think that’s my riskiest one yet.

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“I will speak as long as it takes, until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important,” Paul declared. “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.”

Even though I disagree with Paul on virtually every other issue and generally consider him to be kind of a joke, I’d have been happy to be proven wrong. Maybe he had a conscience. Maybe he would become a much needed civil liberties leader on the right.

Alas, I haven’t been proven wrong. Mr. Filibuster, the tribune of civil liberties, now says that drones should have been used against the Tsarnaev brothers in Boston – not only that, he told Fox’s Neal Cavuto they should even be used against someone robbing a liquor store.

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"If there is a killer on the loose in a neighborhood, I’m not against drones being used to search them," he said on the Fox Business Channel.

Paul said that the difference in this case was that there was an "imminent threat."

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Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky) in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid today urged him to reconsider immigration legislation because of the bombings in Boston. “The facts emerging in the Boston Marathon bombing have exposed a weakness in our current system,” Paul writes. “If we don’t use this debate as an opportunity to fix flaws in our current system, flaws made even more evident last week, then we will not be doing our jobs.”

Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), senior Republican senator on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is responsible for an immigration reform bill, is using much the same language – suggesting that the investigation of two alleged Boston attackers will “help shed light on the weaknesses of our system.”

Can we just get a grip? Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is a naturalized American citizen. He came to the United States when he was nine years old. He attended the public schools of Cambridge, Massachusetts, not far from where I lived.

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Here's Taranto parsing the forensics of her column-writing abilities on an NRA radio show Friday, caught by Media Matters' Timothy Johnson yesterday:

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Showing flashes of anger and passion rare for this president, Obama laid into the National Rifle Association and Senate Republicans, saying they "willfully lied on this bill," especially by erroneously claiming the bipartisan background check legislation known as Manchin-Toomey would create a national gun registry when, in fact, the bill made creating one a felony punishable by 15 years in prison. Even though politicians lie all the time, the word "lie" is almost never uttered in public discourse in Washington, let alone by the president, underscoring his unusual anger.

"Unfortunately, this pattern of spreading untruths about this legislation served a purpose. Those lies upset an intense minority of gun owners and that in turn intimidated a lot of senators," Obama said. "There were no coherent arguments as to why we shouldn't do this, it came down to politics."

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McConnell's very good week might not end up meaning very much, though, if the United States Senate manages, somehow, to pass major legislation on gun control and immigration any time soon. Because whenever the United States Senate manages to accomplish anything, conservatives get very irate with Mitch McConnell for allowing it to happen.

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He then continued on an increasingly out-of-touch and ignorant conversation on race relations between the GOP and blacks. Jon Stewart shares the highlights and sets the record straight:

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In a jam-packed auditorium at the historically black college in Washington, D.C., Paul gave the hard sell, arguing that the Republican message of smaller government, school choice and individual freedom should appeal to minorities who have been victims of state-sponsored oppression, crumbling schools and general subjugation.

But most of his speech was a history lesson, as he spent the first 20 minutes insisting that Democrats, and not Republicans, are responsible for every ill that has befallen blacks in the United States, from the preservation of slavery to Jim Crow. "The story of emancipation, voting rights and citizenship, from Fredrick Douglass until the modern civil rights era, is in fact the history of the Republican Party,” Paul said. "The horrible Jim Crow in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s was all Democrats."

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Sen. Paul’s speech will focus on the importance of outreach to younger voters, as well as minority groups. He will also discuss the history of the African-American community’s roots in the Republican Party and current issues, such as school choice and civil liberties

It will be interesting to see what the audience at the school, which is still overwhelmingly African-American, makes of the speech from a senator who once said he didn't support the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on the grounds that it impinged on business owners' rights (he later walked back the remark).

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Politico reports:

The group has blitzed the districts of Virginia Republicans Cantor and Rep. Scott Rigell with $50,000 worth of TV and radio ads accusing them of helping President Barack Obama pass gun control legislation.

Paul’s email pitches for the group don’t mention Cantor or Rigell by name, but his activity for an organization that attacks fellow Republicans shows the potential 2016 presidential contender isn’t afraid to pick a fight inside the party.

“Rand signs normal, run-of-the-mill activist emails and letters for numerous groups and this is one of them,” Paul's spokesman said. “That’s all he’s ever done for them, he’s not affiliated with the group in any way, he doesn’t control how they decide their activism should take place in terms of who the people are that need to be shored up on an issue.”

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Politico reports:

Though they don’t use the word “filibuster” in the letter, the conservatives are leaving no doubt that they would filibuster on an initial procedural question — the motion to proceed.

Lee staged a test vote on the issue during consideration of the Senate budget last week. He tried to amend a point of order against gun control legislation to the budget but fell short. It needed a three-fifths supermajority and failed 50-49, needing 60 votes to pass. But the final tally emboldened Lee, Paul and Cruz because they were so close to a majority and a filibuster takes just 41 votes to sustain.

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On gun control:

Michael Bloomberg, who launched a $12 million ad blitz to push for gun control, promised that Congress would have a vote on an assault weapons ban. “We've been fighting since 2007 to get a vote. We are going to have a vote for sure on assault weapons and we're going to have a vote on background checks,” he said on "Meet the Press." Bloomberg added: “If we were to get background checks only, it wouldn't be as good as if we got both, but look, we demanded a plan and then we demanded a vote. We've got the plan, we're going to get the vote."

Wayne LaPierre later slammed Bloomberg's effort. "He can't spend enough of of his $27 billion to try to impose his will on the American public," LaPierre said on "Meet the Press." He added that Bloomberg is "so reckless in terms of his comments on this whole gun issue."

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In a tweet, Fischer, the Director of Issues Analysis for the American Family Association, wrote:

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Evangelical Pat Robertson also recently came out for changing marijuana policy: “I really believe we should treat marijuana the way we treat beverage alcohol,” he told the New York Times. “I’ve never used marijuana and I don’t intend to, but it’s just one of those things that I think: this war on drugs just hasn’t succeeded.”

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Speaking on Fox News Sunday, Paul said that even the last two presidents used drugs at some point. "Look, the last two presidents could have conceivably been put in jail for their drug use and I really think - look what would've happened, it would've ruined their lives," he said. "They got lucky. But a lot of poor kids, particularly in the inner city, don't get lucky and they don't have good attorneys and they go to jail for some of these things and I think it's a big mistake."

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Earlier this year I told everyone to be skeptical that immigration reform would pass, and one of the reasons I cited was the I thought rather obvious fact that House Republicans didn't support it. Now Rand Paul nearly has me convinced it could pass the House with more Republican than Democratic support.

Paul's primary argument was to convince very conservative politicians that they could get away with supporting immigration reform, even though the president wants it and many conservative voters don't. The strategy is to just use different words, basically.

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The New York Times reports:

[The] new political landscape in Washington contrasts sharply with just a few years ago, when most Republicans derided the idea of legalized status for illegal immigrants as a form of amnesty that would simply encourage more people to cross the border illegally.

The overall shift in sentiment means that four months after Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, made “self-deportation” the party’s official position on immigration — and lost decisively to President Obama, especially among Hispanic voters — top party strategists and lawmakers of all ideological stripes are racing to change course.

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From earlier:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky is endorsing a pathway to citizenship for the nation's 11 million illegal immigrants, a significant move for a favorite of tea party Republicans who are sometimes hostile to such an approach.

In a speech to be delivered Tuesday morning to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the potential 2016 presidential candidate declares, "If you wish to live and work in America, then we will find a place for you." A copy of the speech was obtained in advance by The Associated Press.

Paul's path to citizenship would come with conditions that could make it long and difficult for illegal immigrants. Chief among these, Congress would have to agree first that progress was being made on border security.

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The instinct to compare the two Paul's is natural. They largely share the same quirky libertarianism, and when Ron stepped out of politics after his third and final presidential campaign last year, it seemed like he was handing off the movement he started to his son. But Ron Paul probably isn't the best point of reference for understanding where Rand Paul fits in today's Republican universe, and the role he could play in the years to come. A more interesting comparison might be found in the career of Robert A. Taft, the leader of a mid-20th Century conservative movement that was anchored by many of the basic tenets of Paul-ism.

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