Senator Rand Paul’s filibuster will prove to be just the beginning, the senator himself is reporting in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post. He asserts, as many of us deduced, that his 13-hour stand on the floor of the upper chamber wasn’t just about whether John Brennan should be confirmed as director of central intelligence. It was about spurring “a national debate about the limits of executive power and the scope of every American’s natural right to be free.” He says that the Senate “has the power to restrain the executive branch” and declares that his filibuster “was the beginning of the fight to restore a healthy balance of powers.”

It happens that these columns share those sentiments down to the ground. One can debate, as conservatives seem to be doing, whether the administration’s penchant for drone warfare is the symbol that resonates. We may not see where the administration’s drone strategy has run off the constitutional rails, as the editor of the Sun has put it. But we do see where the drone program could yet run off the rails. And it’s clear that the Obama administration is chafing at the constraints that are laid on our government in respect of everything from guns, to health care, to the dollar.

So the Obama years are an important moment for those of us who have signed up for the long struggle for limited government. It is not a moment where we want to get into a mid-air wrestling match over whether we should be worried about drones. What is emerging in the Senate is a new generation of leaders who define their cause in terms of the Constitution’s contract for separated and enumerated powers, its reservation of un-enumerated powers to the states and the people, and its system of protecting our rights by laying prohibitions on the government. This is the camp for which Rand Paul stood up.

It was all the more wonderful a moment because of those who stood with him. One was Marco Rubio, the young senator of Florida. Another was Mike Lee, a particularly brilliant senator of Utah who learned his constitutional law at the knee of his father, Rex, one of President Reagan’s solicitors general. But the senator whose remarks in the filibuster caught our ear was the new senator of Texas, Ted Cruz. In contradistinction to Dr. Paul, who is a physician (like Maimonides), Mr. Cruz is a Harvard-trained lawyer. He used the filibuster to deliver a discourse on one of our favorite cases of all time, Medillin v. Texas.

That is the case in which the Supreme Court blocked the United Nations, the World Court, Mexico, and America from interfering with the authority of Texas to execute a foreign national Texas had determined was guilty of murder. The case is one of the most complex and subtle and important. It vouchsafes limits on the power of the president and the Senate to bind Americans by treaty if the full Congress has failed to enact enabling law. It is a reminder that the states themselves — their sensitivities, standing, judicial decisions — must be respected in fact. Not a bad point to remember at the start of the age of drones.

So we’re delighted to read Senator Paul’s declaration that the filibuster is but the beginning. These columns have been saying for years that America is in a constitutional moment. Now we have a rising core of brilliant young senators who think constitutionally, are pegged to the parchment, and have the idealism of youth. What a tragedy that Senators McCain and Graham are choosing to greet their first revolt with condescension and sneering. Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Mike Lee, Ted Cruz — the American people — deserve better, particularly from a senator who, in Mr. McCain, made his signature a campaign finance law that sought to eviscerate the very Bill of Rights up for which the new generation has spoken.