The Patriot Act's Surprising Defenders
The Patriot Act's Surprising Defenders It was a tough and tricky crowd. When Joe Lieberman took the stage, on October 17, and politely reaffirmed his commitment to the security of a Jewish state in...
...And he is not exactly alone...
...No, what the Patriot Act really needs are some Democratic defenders...
...anti-terrorism law—as opposed to the paranoiac fantasy version now being circulated throughout the land by the likes of Bob Barr and Howard Dean...
...Longtime Republican activists Grover Norquist and David Keene are pleased to appear, with the likes of Alec Baldwin and People for the American Way's Ralph Neas, at anti-Patriot Act teach-ins...
...Dean's lusty attacks on the Bush administration, however, were a great deal more successful...
...So who'll defend the Patriot Act...
...Barr votes 'aye.'") that represents "an official step into the Brave New World of 1984...
...My staff emailed the ACLU and asked them for instances of actual abuses...
...Former Republican congressman Bob Barr has lately joined forces with the ACLU to campaign against a Patriot Act ("Mr...
...And "perhaps some ignorance," she added...
...Yet the next day, when it was his turn to address the Dearborn, Michigan, candidates' forum sponsored by James Zogby's Arab American Institute, Howard Dean went over like gangbusters...
...I'm not aware of any act, or any piece of legislation ever that has been undertaken by human beings, who are certainly subject to imperfections, that has ultimately ended up in a situation where it did not have to be refined," Racicot stuttered in response to an audience member's question during his own presentation to the Arab American Institute on October 17...
...Indeed, so low has the Patriot Act's reputation fallen that Marc Racicot, the chairman of President Bush's reelection campaign, is afraid to endorse it in public...
...Patrick Leahy of Vermont—yet another Democratic senator who was only recently proud to vote yes on the question—^now boasts that opposition to the law exists "across the political spectrum, from the far right to the far left...
...How's about we concentrate on some facts, Feinstein suggested...
...And Edwards, too, routinely gets standing ovations in the process...
...Except these turned out to be unrelated civil liberties gripes, or complaints about a "Patriot Act II" that doesn't yet exist...
...For this, Howard Dean got a standing ovation...
...For all practical political purposes, the poor man is no longer one of those imperfect human beings Marc Racicot talks about...
...Ashcroft and the Patriot Act still enjoy broad Republican support on Capitol Hill...
...Wonders never cease...
...At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the Patriot Act last week, the attorney general came under a shower of abuse for ducking an appearance even though, as committee chairman Orrin Hatch eventually pointed out, Ashcroft hadn't actually been invited...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...Democrats running for office think attacking the Patriot Act is a winner...
...Unfortunately, there's hardly a single Republican who can do the job effectively...
...Dean's condemnation of deliberate, violent assaults on civilian innocents—"the vast majority of Arab Americans and Arabs in general do not think that terrorism is appropriate, and we need to be clear about that"—fell noticeably flat, in fact, winning only "scattered applause," as the session's official transcript recounts...
...Otherwise, we're with Dianne Feinstein a hundred percent...
...I have never had a single [verified] abuse of the Patriot Act reported to me...
...The widespread hullabaloo over the Patriot Act, Senator Feinstein concluded, proceeds from "substantial uncertainty . . . about what this bill actually does do...
...This will be news to Attorney General John Ashcroft, who for his part continues to stump the country hither and yon, giving speeches about the 150-plus terrorism convictions made possible only by the Patriot Act—about how federal agents, using investigative tools freshly granted to them by that law, have since disrupted terrorist cells in Buffalo, Seattle, Portland, and Detroit...
...Senator John Edwards says he's "horrified" by what the Patriot Act has wrought and wants a fair chunk of it canceled—this, barely two years after Edwards, along with every other Democratic senator but one, voted to enact the thing to begin with...
...When Joe Lieberman took the stage, on October 17, and politely reaffirmed his commitment to the security of a Jewish state in Israel, he was booed and heckled for it...
...And California's Dianne Feinstein went further still, in a stern and lengthy lecture about the concrete reality of U.S...
...Wesley Clark, Dean's leading rival for the presidential nomination in every national poll, says the Patriot Act has "essentially suspended habeas corpus," and nobody seems to mind that Clark's charge is "essentially" baseless...
...We'd challenge that "perhaps" part...
...Edwards, too, routinely denounces the Patriot Act for producing law enforcement "excesses" that, truth be told, long predate that law, lie far outside its purview, or are entirely imaginary...
...A fair number of Republicans don't want to defend the Patriot Act, of course...
...And so on...
...But Biden did say all these things, anyway...
...It never fails...
...They deserve a loud round of applause, and a great deal more publicity...
...Not because his message on the Middle East was so much better received, mind you...
...Particularly when he went after the Justice Department for its implementation of domestic counterterrorism measures authorized by the USA Patriot Act of 2001, a law which is "shameful" and "morally wrong" and "unconstitutional...
...And the cartoon Ashcroft is "authoritarian"—and too "divisive" to persuade any but the already persuaded that "authoritarian" isn't quite the right word to apply to his Justice Department or to the Patriot Act the department is administering...
...But here, alas, Ashcroft is engaged in what's probably a hopeless effort...
...His "expectation," Racicot offered, "although I certainly have not talked with the president about this issue," is that "refinements to that act . . . so that it does not end up invading the civil rights of any American [is] a cause that will be undertaken...
...Barr...
...In an atmosphere of such intense suspicion, the arguments of party loyalists can only be sold at the deepest of discounts—insofar as they can be sold at all...
...And, we're pleased to report, it now has two...
...Now, Orrin Hatch is a fine fellow, don't get us wrong...
...I've tried to see what has happened in the complaints that have come in," she said, "and I've received to date 21,434 complaints about the Patriot Act...
...They emailed back and said they had none...
...Ashcroft, instead, has become a cartoon, as sometimes happens in our public life (think Dan Quayle...
...At last week's Senate hearing, Joe Biden of Delaware didn't have to say that "the tide of criticism" being directed against the Patriot Act "is both misinformed and overblown," that "I stand by my support" of that law, and that the Ashcroft Justice Department has "done a pretty good job in terms of implementing" the law's provisions...
...It's gotten to the point where Ashcroft is automatically blamed for things he can't possibly have done...
...Pretty much the entire, all-Republican Idaho congressional delegation is now leading a forceful legislative charge to repeal certain key sections of the Patriot Act, and they are winning bipartisan support even from senators and representatives whose home states don't—yet—have a black helicopter problem...
...And he is right about that, though his inadvertently suggestive "far" speaks more to a certain irritable, anti-government reflex than to any coherent ideological impulse, conservative or liberal...
...But party loyalists like Hatch are less than ideally situated to reassure America that the Bush administration's war on terrorism is other than a fascist plot...
Vol. 9 • November 2003 • No. 8
