As Sen. Rand Paul R-Ky. approached the 8-hour mark of his filibuster in protest of the Obama administration’s drone program, his colleague Sen. Ted Cruz R-Texas approached the Senate floor to read tweets in support.
“Given that the Senate rules to not allow for the use of cellular phones on the Senate floor, I feel quite confident that the senator from Kentucky is not aware of the Twitterverse that has been exploding,” Cruz declared. “So what I wanted to do for the Senator from Kentucky is give some small sampling of the reaction on twitter so that he might understand how the American people are responding to his courageous leadership.”
Cruz began reading tweets out loud for over five minutes on the Senate floor, citing the popular hashtags #StandWithRand and #filiblizzard. As electronics are banned on the Senate floor, Cruz read them from several sheets of paper.
Cruz added that the Paul’s Twitter account was tweeting simultaneously as continued to speak.
“I will commend the senator from Kentucky for being so flexible that he was able to tweet while standing on the floor of the Senate,” he joked adding that, “I think the technical term for what the Twitterverse is doing right now is called‘blowing up.'”
Paul thanked Cruz for coming to the floor and “cheering him up,” admitting that he “was getting kind of tired.”
“I appreciate you bringing news from the outside world.” Paul added. “As you know, we’re not allowed to have electronics on the floor so I don’t really have much knowledge of the electronic outside world.”
Paul added that “it’s probably a good thing for every American eventually not to see their phone or their computer for about eight hours.”
*Update* 10:13 pm: Cruz returned to the Senate floor to read more tweets after Sen. Rand Paul continued into his 10th hour.
