PATRIOT Act Loses Steam as Americans Reassert Their Freedom

[RJnAbbysNana]

January 19, 2006

PATRIOT Agonistes
Bad law loses steam as Americans reassert their freedom

David Weigel


It was like a Peanuts cartoon where Lucy decided not to grab Charlie Brown's football. Last month, a bill to make permanent 16 privacy-shredding provisions of PATRIOT Act arrived in the Senate for an expected "yea" vote. Civil libertarians had watched "anti-terror" laws sail through Congress since the PATRIOT Act passed 98-1 four years ago, and the steamroller wasn't going to up and stop.

And then, it stopped. Thanks to a filibuster led by Idaho Republican Larry Craig and Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold, the permanent extensions hit a reef, lawmakers scrambled to pass a temporary extension, and a final reckoning was delayed until February 3. The PATRIOT Act isn't dead, but that it's got to face more bickering and amending before it can pass again is a genuine surprise. It's the strongest, most satisfying evidence yet that Americans are coming back to their pre-9/11 ideas about freedom and privacy.

So far that's happening without the knowledge of Washington pundits, power brokers, and the White House. In the nation's capital the PATRIOT vote was seen as a Christmas gift to George Bush from Democrats who commit political suicide as if they enjoy it. Immediately after the filibuster on December 16, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman soldered on his Darth Vader mask and promised electoral doom for the terror-loving Dems. "In 2002, the American people rejected politicians who blocked the Department of Homeland Security to appease public employee unions," Mehlman warned. "Democrats who blocked the PATRIOT Act to appease the hard left should beware."

But Mehlman unwittingly stumbled on the chief reason Democrats and Republicans felt safe going after the PATRIOT Act: Doing so would win them some elections. As I noted in the November issue of Reason, no senator who voted against the PATRIOT Act in 2001 or subsequently voted to amend it has ever lost a race; five congressmen who voted to reject or amend the act have lost their seats, but those losses had more to do with redistricting and a gay marriage vote than with their positions on the PATRIOT act. The Senate's anti-PATRIOT mover, Russ Feingold, is an increasingly-serious presidential candidate. The two PATRIOT reformers in the House, liberal independent Bernie Sanders and conservative Republican Butch Otter, are going to win landslide elections to higher office in November—Sanders to a Senate seat in Vermont (Kerry by 20 points), Otter to the governor's office in Idaho (Bush by 38).

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http://www.reason.com/hod/dw011906.shtml

[davidwparker]

1. Good. Have we gotten tired of WTO/NAFTA yet? I am.

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