973
Patriot Act is Government Business as Usual
Editorial
Government's response to failure and nonperformance is usually to increase budgets and expand its powers, and that's exactly what the federal government did with the Halloween week passage of the anything but patriotic Patriot Act of 2001. William Niskanen, chairman of the Cato Institute said it in a nutshell: "The federal government regulates security at our airports but failed to do the job. The federal government regulates immigration into the United States but failed to screen out even people known to be associated with terrorist organizations. Now the irony is that the events of September 11 have led to an increased demand for the federal government to do what it already has failed to do."
Well, this is war and polls conducted in October indicated that a majority of Americans would be willing to have more restrictions on their freedoms in order to increase their feeling of "security." Perhaps the failures noted above didn't register. Not to mention the failures of the War on Drugs which has cost taxpayers more billions every year and turned the country into a semi-police state overrun with SWAT teams. And what is the bottom-line result? The creation of the world's most profitable business... the drug trade, which finances and promotes every crime and vice imaginable... including terrorism.
But never mind, we're going to fix the terrorist problem by trashing the First and Fourth Amendment rights guaranteed to every American by the Constitution.
With one sweep of the pen the so-called Patriot Act wiped out the Fourth Amendment.... you know, that old clause that says "the right of the people to be secure in their persons and house and papers..." no warrants to be issued without probable cause.
War is said to be the friend of the state, justifying government limitations of peoples' liberty and exactions of peoples' property.
And how!
Here are a few of the acts of violence committed against the Constitution in the Patriot Act:
- It greatly expands the powers of police to conduct searches without prior notice and without warrants.
- It grants the FBI broad access to sensitive business records by order of a secret court without showing evidence of a crime, and forbids the business to tell anyone of the search.
- It allows prison officials and federal investigators to eavesdrop in on conversations between prisoners and their attorneys.
- It contains changes to criminal procedure that applies to every federal criminal investigation, not just those involving terrorism.
- The "guilt by association" clause allows the government to compel the disclosure of personal records of anyone who, by chance, lived near, worked with, attended school with or sat on a plane with a suspected terrorist.
- Vague terms such as "significant purpose" allows surveillance of any Internet, telephone and other communication.
- The definition of "domestic terrorism" is so broad that it could potentially allow the federal government to prosecute political protesters against NAFTA, WTO and anyone deemed "antigovernment" by the feds.
Democrat Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, the sole Senate dissenter against the bill, said, "This is an enormous expansion of authority. The government can apparently go on a fishing expedition and collect information on virtually anyone."
In his opposition speech on the Senate floor, Feingold told his peers that no doubt it would be easier to catch terrorists in a police state where police could search anyone's home for any reason, open your mail, eavesdrop on phone conversations and hold people in jail indefinitely based on what they write or think.
"But that probably would not be a country in which we would want to live," Feingold said.
Apparently Feingold was wrong. It's a country where the majority of our elected officials want to live. Everyone but Feingold voted for the misnamed Patriot Act in the Senate one day after the House approved it 357-66. President Bush signed it into law the following day.
Rep. C. L. 'Butch' Otter of Idaho, one of only three Republican House dissenters, said, "Some of these provisions place more power in the hands of law enforcement than our Founding Fathers could have dreamed, and severely compromises the civil liberties of law-abiding Americans. This bill, while crafted with good intentions, is rife with constitutional infringements I cannot support."
Rep. Bernie Sanders of Vermont said he did not vote for the bill because he "took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States," and he was concerned that voting for the legislation fundamentally violated that oath. The contents of the legislation had not been subjected to serious hearings or examination, he said.
Arizona's J.D. Hayworth voted for the bill, as did every congressman in the state with the exception of Democratic Rep. Pastor.
With Rep. Pastor it's hard to tell if he's acquired a new devotion to the Constitution or simply voted against his Republican peers on principle along with 62 other House Democrats.
What makes a bad bill even worse is that this mischief-ridden piece of work cleverly crafted and tagged with a noble name for the benefit of a public whose reason was clouded by emotion following the attack on the World Trade Center.... was rushed through and not even read by most of those who voted for it!
According to Republican Ron Paul, the bill was not available to most legislators before the vote and his own eventually successful efforts to read the draft were stonewalled at every turn.
Paul said, "The insult is to call this a 'patriot bill' and suggest I'm not a patriot because I insisted upon finding out what is in it and voting no. I thought it was undermining the Constitution, so I didn't vote for it... and therefore I'm somehow not a patriot. That's insulting."
President Bush proclaimed that anyone who isn't with us is against us. The question Americans should be asking themselves is whether that question applies not only to other countries, but also to thinking Americans who dare to criticize a government that used a time of crisis to launch a devastating sneak attack on the very principles this country stands for.
Maybe we no longer understand what we are about. The U.S. Supreme Court once held: "The principles that embody the essence of constitutional liberty and security forbid all invasions on the part of government and its employees of the sanctity of a man's home, and the privacies of his life." (154 U.S. 447)
And wasn't it Benjamin Franklin who said that those who would give up essential liberties for a little security deserve neither liberty or security?
Shame on a government that declares a war to defend American liberty while tightening the chains of oppression at home.
And shame on us for allowing our servant to become our master.
Payson.cc © 2001 Carrol Cox
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