House Bloodies President’s Nose in Patriot Act Vote

The misnamed Patriot Act, passed in the hysteria of post 9/11 Washington without a single member of Congress actually reading the thing, contains 15 provisions that will expire at the end of this year. The Bush Administration wants those provisions made permanent. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives just turned the president down on renewing one of the 15 by a vote of 238-187, and the president has threatened to veto the appropriations bill to which it is attached. Congress should dare the president to do so.

The provision in question allows the FBI to access to personal information like what books one has borrowed from a library with an order from a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court with a dreadfully low threshold of proof. The amendment to the appropriations bill that passed the House would require warrants from federal judges or grand jury subpoenae [never “subpoenas” or even worse “subpenas” – although one does accept the quiet deaths of “fœderal” and "mediæval"] to get this information.

Robert W. Ney (R-OH) who chairs the House Administration Committee was one of three House Republicans who opposed the Patriot Act when it was enacted in 2001. He voted to curtail the G-men’s power yesterday saying, "Everybody's against terrorism, but there has to be reason in the way that we fight it. The government doesn't need to be sifting through library records. I talked to my libraries, and they felt very strongly about this." The librarians aren’t the only ones.

Meanwhile the jackasses at the Justice Department argue that there should be no safe haven for terrorists at libraries or bookstores. As Assistant Attorney General William E. Moschella said in a letter to Congress, "Bookstores and libraries should not be carved out as safe havens for terrorists and spies, who have, in fact, used public libraries to do research and communicate with their co-conspirators.” The fact, however, is that the FBI has used this provision for searches 35 times in since the Act was passed, and not once has it used it to check up on anyone’s reading material. Clearly, the FBI isn’t using the power, so just why does it have it? And more to the point, no one has ever been convicted of violating the Patriot Act – so what good is it? After more than three years, it adds up to nothing.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bush has threatened to veto the bill if the offending amendment remains after the House and Senate conference committee gets done with it. Mr. Bush has never used his veto pen, and it would be a fine place to start. It would spell out that the White House wants to concentrate power in the executive branch and is prepared to halt some government activities to get it. Then, the GOP legislators would have to decide either to back their fearless leader or do their constitutional duty. In the run up to the 2006 mid-term elections, this could prove a very interesting proposition.



© Copyright 2005 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.
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