Rand Paul Filibuster Devolves In 7th Hour As Ted Cruz Starts Reading Directly From Twitter

As the filibuster of CIA director nominee John Brennan approached its eight-hour mark Wednesday evening, Sen. Rand Paul and his fellow outraged colleagues began to show signs of tiring, with little left unsaid about the Obama administration and the drone program. But to the rescue came Sen. Ted Cruz, armed with a stack of paper on which supportive tweets were printed.

Cruz explained that because senators are not allowed to use electronics in the Senate chamber, it was doubtful that Paul knew about the outpouring of support for his feat that has been flowing on Twitter for most of the day.

He then proceeded to spend several minutes reading directly from the list of tweets, often using the hashtags #filiblizzard or #StandWithRand, both of which have been trending nationally on and off throughout the day. To the likely chagrin of the tweets’ authors, Cruz did not mention any specific Twitter handles. And of course, the content was kept overtly positive, with several tweets about how “proud” people were of their new “hero” Rand Paul.

Once Cruz had finished reading his list, he uttered a phrase that up until this point had probably not been used on the Senate floor. “I think the technical term for what the Twitterverse is doing right now is called blowing up.”

Watch video below, via C-SPAN:

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