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Mr. McCain, of Arizona, and Mr. Graham, of South Carolina, who often team up on national security policy issues, ridiculed Mr. Paul's suggestion during his more than 12-hour appearance on the Senate floor that the president could order a domestic drone strike on an American citizen without due process. Mr. Paul had said that he would try to hold up the nomination of John O. Brennan as director of the Central Intelligence Agency unless the administration answered unequivocally that Mr. Obama did not have that power.

Mr. McCain, who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, noted that Mr. Paul had raised the idea that the antiwar activist Jane Fonda could have been singled out for a strike during her criticism of that war. He said that claim was unfounded and that the filibuster, which received the backing of members of the Senate Republican leadership, sent a message that was a "disservice to Americans."

"To allege that the United States, our government, would drop a drone Hellfire missile on Jane Fonda, that brings the conversation from a serious discussion about U.S. policy into the realm of the ridiculous," Mr. McCain said.

Mr. Graham said he did not remember Republican critics attacking President George W. Bush for employing drone strikes, and he said the question for Republicans was, "What are we up to here?"

Mr. Paul, a first-term senator from Kentucky, earned an outpouring of praise from conservatives and was joined on the Senate floor by top Republican leaders as he called into question the Obama administration's development of drone policy.

Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader and a fellow Kentuckian, congratulated him on the filibuster and noted "his extraordinary effort."

But Mr. McCain and Mr. Graham did not share the leadership's enthusiasm for the filibuster, which took on an antiterrorism approach that Republicans have strongly supported in the past.