There are plenty of people on the left who, reluctantly or otherwise, supported Rand Paul’s 13-hour “filibuster” of John Brennan’s confirmation as CIA director. Did he bring an important subject to the attention of the American people? I suppose he did, although he did it in about the stupidest way imaginable. The incident was actually less interesting for what it taught us about drones than what it taught us about the current state of the Republican Party.

Last year, Ron Paul didn’t do very well in his effort to win the Republican nomination for the presidency, but his ground game was better than the candidate. A lot of delegates at the Republican National Convention were Paulistas. Ron Paul and his son Rand are clearly insane, but they are also implacable opponents of the neo-conservatives who are now represented most strongly in Washington by the John McCain-Lindsey Graham-Kelly Ayotte troika. McCain and Graham had dinner with Obama the night of Rand’s blabfest, and they went to the floor of the Senate the next morning to ridicule Rand and defend the president. The thing is, they don’t have as much company as you would think. After all, even Minority Leader Mitch McConnell briefly joined Rand Paul’s filibuster. And there is Newt Gingrich:

“What I find sad about Sen. McCain’s recent comments both to Ted Cruz, when Ted Cruz was frankly raising legitimate questions [about Benghazi] and with Rand Paul, is, you know, when I first knew John McCain in the House — he was a maverick. In the Senate, for years, he was a maverick,” Gingrich said Thursday on Fox News.

He continued: “Of everybody I know in the Senate, I didn’t know anybody who had a better record of bucking the leadership, doing what he thought mattered, marching to his own drummer. And I think that it’s unfortunate. But I think frankly it doesn’t hurt Ted Cruz and it doesn’t hurt Rand Paul — it hurts John McCain. The country is moving on, we’re in a new era, people know that these are legitimate questions.”

Gingrich was reacting not only to McCain’s comments on the Senate floor and during a recent hearing, but to his conversation with Jon Ward of the Huffington Post, in which he referred to Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mi) as “wacko birds.”

Another sign that the militant wing of the Republican Party is in decline is that the Sequester has gone into effect despite the deep defense cuts it contains. If Obama miscalculated about anything, it was in not realizing how ascendent the Paulistas would be after the 2012 election. The Sequester was designed to be a fool-proof deterrent, but it didn’t turn out that way. It didn’t turn out that way because defense hawks like John McCain have gone from being the dominant force in American politics during the Bush years, to being lonely voices that are dismissed by Newt Gingrich as irrelevant relics of the past.