Andrew Napolitano on Rand Paul's Classified Briefings

The rules for classified briefings of members of Congress on areas of government behavior that the government wants to keep from its employers—the American people—are a real Catch-22. Those rules allow representatives and senators to interrogate government officials about government behavior that they are afraid to reveal, and they require those officials to answer honestly and completely. But the rules keep the interrogations secret, and they expressly prohibit members of Congress from telling anyone what they have learned.

So Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and his colleagues who joined in the secret briefing now know the terrible truth about the government watching us, but they cannot reveal what they know. Paul—who is the son of Rep. Ron Paul, the greatest congressional defender of limited government in our era—when asked what he learned at these secret briefings and aware that he could be prosecuted for telling the truth, chose a fictitious word to describe the vast number of violations of privacy at the hands of federal agents: gazillions. Paul's personal courage in using a word like gazillions to convey an oblique message of truth in the face of an unjust law that commanded his silence reminded Andrew Napolitano of St. Thomas More's silence in the face of an unjust law that commanded his assent to the king's headship of the church.