Where’d the Patriot Act’s Malcontents
Go?
By
Anthony
Gregory | Wednesday May 25, 2011 at 8:33 AM PDT
It seems like only yesterday that a power-hungry president and
administration, bent on starting preventive wars, shredding due process
rights, stripping detainees of habeas corpus, and asserting executive
supremacy in almost everything was trying to push the Patriot Act through
an executive-friendly Senate and complacent House of Representatives.
Members of his party were using procedural tricks to ram the bill through
without the full deliberation it deserved. Leaders of the president’s
party marginalized those who stood up in protest. Of course, this first
happened in October 2001, but it has been happening all over again,
although now the president is a Democrat and not a Republican.
Congress is on the verge of extending
the Patriot Act for another few years. Most Republicans have always
supported doing so, although
President Obama wanted a longer extension than even they
proposed.
Obama wasn’t always a big supporter of this Bush-era legislation that
guts the Fourth Amendment among other quaint niceties. In 2003, he called
the Act
“
shoddy and dangerous” and vowed as a Senator to vote against it. In
2006 he instead voted for a “compromise” that kept most of the Act in
place.
Across the board, Obama has been a disaster on civil liberties,
solidifying the Bush anti-terror state on warrantless wiretapping,
detention policy, and surveillance; pushing for new federal controls of
the internet; attacking financial privacy at every turn; and just
generally aggrandizing the national police power. Without seeing the
humor of it, many conservatives boast that now theat Obama is president
he realizes how right Bush was about executive supremacy and violations
of due process. Lord Acton said something about power corrupting that
might explain the phenomenon. But surely, this man whom the conservatives
rightly critique for his megalomaniacal power plays in the domestic
economy would never champion broad presidential power in the war on
terrorism for its own sake.
Yet what is more interesting than a politician’s
predictable flip-flop is a cultural question: Where has all the
opposition gone? During the Bush years, the Patriot Act was seen as a
symbol of all that was wrong with a lawless and predatory administration.
The left regarded it as the embodiment of the presidential overreach and
big-brother tactics of the Republicans. There are still many who are
somewhat critical of the Act, but where is the urgency and
outrage?
Part of it can be explained in terms of pure partisanship and political
priorities. Left-liberal opponents of Bush’s Patriot Act are so concerned
with defending Obama, especially his domestic policy, that they have no
time to notice much less loudly expose Obama’s many similarities to the
last president on almost every war on terror issue.
There is also a more insidious cultural and ideological dynamic at play.
Let us remember than in 2001 we were assured both that the Patriot Act
was necessary to fight the war on terrorism – that without its tools, our
national police and intelligence forces would be impotent and
uncoordinated – and, paradoxically, that the Patriot Act did not effect
any revolution in law enforcement practices and only empowered the feds
to do what they were already doing in the drug war. Not only does this
demonstrate the amazing capacity of common Americans to swallow
discordant propaganda; it reminds us that the Patriot Act was rammed
through quickly after years of desensitization to other violations of the
Fourth Amendment and depredations on our civil liberties. If not for the
drug war – whose extraconstitutional measures were assumed in this line
of argument to be completely acceptable – Americans would have likely
never been acclimated to nearly the degree of heavy-handed police
measures that were already typical in the republic before 9/11. Matters
have become much worse, but American culture had already been warped so
as not to resemble its earlier, more Jeffersonian character that embraced
a cynicism and reflexive distrust toward the national
government.
Ten years after the Patriot Act first passed, Americans are simply used
to it. It is a fixture of federal power, hardly any more controversial
than Social Security, the Department of Education, or the Marines. Some
of us remember how drastic a shift away from liberty and toward power it
seemed a decade ago, and some of us still resent it. But it is now a
thoroughly bipartisan element to the war on terror. It is accepted
federal policy. It is almost as accepted as death or taxes, and certainly
less feared. Americans also accept such propaganda as the line that the
Patriot Act has never been abused, that no one innocent has been hurt by
it. To the contrary, the very first man convicted under the Act was
sentenced to eighteen months for incorrectly filing for a state business
license before continuing with his money transmitting business. He was no
“terrorist,” just a minor offender of a technical non-crime. The
absurdities and injustices have only piled up since then. On the other
hand, when has the government ever shown us how the Patriot Act protects
us?
But aside from some journalists and a few odd politicians, no one notices
as the federal government and country once again accept as routine what
was a few years ago regarded as revolutionary. It is, after all,
difficult to maintain the proper level of outrage when the government
strips us of our freedom at such a dizzying speed and frequency. But the
erosion of the Fourth Amendment, the national security letters, the
roving wiretaps, the sneak and peak warrants, the weakening of FISA’s
already permissive requirements, the invasive prohibition of carrying
large sums of cash outside the country without permission, the enhanced
police powers at the border, the snooping on financial, gun and other
records, the redefinition of financial institutions to include a
ludicrously large class of businesses – these should be as
offensive now as they ever were, even with the passing of time, the
cascading of new political issues, and a fresh presidential poster boy
heading up the questionable efforts against “terrorists” at the expense
of our liberties.
http://blog.independent.org/2011/05/25/whered-the-patriot-acts-malcontents-go/
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