Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

I like the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. Really, I do. I can prove it – I’ve clicked “Like” on the Facebook page for the Fourth Amendment.

What, is that not enough?

Luckily, I’m doing more. I work with Irregular Times, for one thing, and for years we’ve been writing about laws like the Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act, begun under George W. Bush and have been continued under Barack Obama, that violate the guarantee the Fourth Amendment’s protection from unreasonable search and seizure. We also have designed the lawn sign of the 4th Amendment that you see here.

I happen to know that this yard sign has had at least a little impact on discussion of Fourth Amendment issues. For one thing, this photograph of our Fourth Amendment yard sign is being used as the profile photo of the Fourth Amendment Facebook page I like.

One particularly current thing we’re doing at Irregular Times to show that we like the 4th Amendment to the Constitution is that we’re initiating a protest against the Patriot Act in Washington D.C. this coming Saturday, March 12, at noon, in front of the U.S. Capitol. As you’ll see in the link in this paragraph, there’s a Facebook page for that too.

The question in my mind is whether all the people who have indicated that they “like” this protest will actually show up. We’ll see how much Facebook social networking is really worth.

Today, in the Winona Daily News, Nathan Hansen of the town of Rushford identifies a startling gap between rhetoric and reality on the part of Minnesota’s two United States senators, Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken.

Both of these Democrats claim to be devoted to the defense of Americans’ constitutional rights, but talk is cheap. In practice, both of them voted last month to renew the worst aspects of the plainly unconstitutional Patriot Act – without any attempt at reform. Hansen notes:

“Franken in committee and in public denounces the Patriot Act provisions, including the one roving wiretaps that was extended by his vote. But his voting record does not agree with this. The vote marks the second time that he violated his principles, and his promises to his constituents in Minnesota, and the American people as a whole.

Klobuchar, too, has publicly opposed Patriot Act provisions, but abandoned them in order to keep from rocking the boat. It is sad that this illiberal bill passed by 86-12 margin, but the truly sad part of the story is that Minnesota’s out-of-the-box senators have not really been doing anything out of the box.”

We don’t have to just sit and take it when public officials like senators Klobuchar and Franken fail to live up to their responsibilities. We can, as Hansen would put it, get out of the box.

This coming Saturday, there will be an opportunity for Americans who oppose the renewal of the extraordinary surveillance powers of the Patriot Act to get out of the box and be heard by Congress. There will be a protest demanding repeal of the Patriot Act on Saturday, March 12 at Noon outside the west side of the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington D.C. Bring a sign of protest to show that America will not be silent while its constitutional right are sacrificed!

Congressman John Garamendi‘s district is strongly progressive, having re-elected Ellen Tauscher repeatedly. So, you’d think that Garamendi, a new member of the House of representatives, just elected a couple months ago in a special election, would try to follow in Tauscher’s progressive footsteps.

Not so. Last week, Representative Garamendi voted to extend the Patriot Act’s worst spying abuses against Americans without any reforms at all.

What was John Garamendi thinking, giving his endorsements to one of the most flagrant violations of the Constitution under George W. Bush? Did he think his vote would escape attention? Did he think no one would protest, just because he’s a Democrat?

Will Garamendi’s calculation end up being correct? Will Democrats simply vote for Garamendi because he’s a Democrat, no matter how anti-progressive his voting record in Congress turns out to be?

Congressman Michael Arcuri is asking Democrats in New York’s 24th district to re-elect him again this year, but really, why should Democrats bother to support Arcuri?

Mike Arcuri has opposed climate legislation, and worked to help the Republicans block health care reform last year until the Tea Party movement could sink it. Last week, Congressman Arcuri voted to extend George W. Bush’s Patriot Act, without any reforms whatsoever.

Blue Dog Arcuri is no friend of the causes that Democratic voters care about. Why should Democrats help him keep a hold on his seat in Congress?

Last year, we warned about the electoral implications of the nomination of Martha Coakley to the U.S. Senate. Coakley supported the Patriot Act, alienating the progressive base of the Democratic Party. Mike Capuano, who was one of the few to vote against the Patriot Act back in 2001, would have been a much better choice, and could have rallied Democratic voters to beat Scott Brown.

All that’s history now. What’s not history is the Patriot Act.

Just last week, the House of Representatives voted to pass an extension of the Patriot Act without any reforms at all, sneaking the vote in as an approval of an unspecified amendment to a Medicare bill.

Two-thirds of the House Democrats voted with the Republicans to approve the reform-free extension of Patriot Act spying powers that the government uses against Americans. Mike Capuano was not one of them. Capuano voted against the perpetuation of George W. Bush’s spying programs.

“You may recall that in 2001, I voted against the Patriot Act because I strongly believed that it did not do enough to protect our cherished civil liberties. I continue to have serious concerns about some of its provisions,” Capuano wrote, explaining his vote. “I want to be clear that it is important to give law enforcement the tools they need to pursue criminals. However, there is a way to do that and still recognize the importance of civil liberties – and such a solution is not currently being pursued by the House and Senate.”

Thank you, Representative Capuano, for taking a stand against the politics of fear.

The re-election campaign web site for Congressman John Conyers claims that Conyers stands against the Patriot Act. It tells how Conyers has reacted to the Patriot Act in the past, reading, “The Bush Administration was not satisfied with a bill that gave it everything it needed; it sacrificed his good faith negotiations and bipartisanship for a bill that had everything it wanted. What the Administration wanted was the ability to conduct secret searches of suspects (also known as “sneak-and-peek” searches), to monitor our reading habits by getting records from libraries and bookstores, and to detain non-citizens indefinitely. To accomplish this, the Administration and the House Republican leadership threw away the bipartisan bill from the Committee and wrote a new one in secret; the new bill, known as the USA PATRIOT Act, was given to the Congress the very morning it was voted on and was not disclosed to the public until much later. The secrecy in which it was written and the extreme provisions it contained were what called for Mr. Conyers to vote against the frightfully-named USA PATRIOT Act.

Unfortunately, the Administration’s war on terrorism proved that his vote was the right one. When Mr. Conyers asked the Justice Department how it has used its sneak-and-peek authority, it cannot tell of one act of terrorism that has been prevented. When Mr. Conyers asked the Department how often it has sought patron records from libraries and bookstores, it responds by saying the very number of times is classified so that the information cannot be disclosed to the public.”

That sounds like a strong stand in opposition to the Patriot Act, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, making sounds is one thing. Action is another.

Yesterday, John Conyers voted to extend the Patriot Act without reforming it at all.

Recommended reading for tonight should get you fired up for this shortened work week: Glenn Greenwald points out the hypocrisy of the Global Online Freedom Act, which it turns out isn’t so global.

The proposed law targets regimes like China and Iran for their use of the Internet to spy on citizens, while ignoring the fact that the United States government does the same using laws like the Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act.

Compare Americans’ reactions to two different bits of news that came out today:

1. Tiger Woods might be cheating on his wife.

2. According to audio recordings of an insider meeting between government spy agencies and the corporations that help them do the spying, gathered by Indiana University grad student Christopher Soghoian, the Bush Administration and Obama Administration demanded private GPS data from consumer mobile devices operated by Sprint-Nextel 8 million times over the last year alone.

So, guess which story is among the most popular among blog readers, according to Google Blogsearch.

You know the answer, don’t you?

Hint: Constitutional rights are soooo last century.

An extremely cynical trick by the leadership of the Senate Judiciary Committee was picked up on today by That’s My Congress, our congressional research arm. It seems that Senator Leahy and Senator Feinstein thought that they could pull the wool over the eyes of America’s librarians.

America’s librarians have been ringing the alarm for years, noting that they are being served with huge numbers of National Security Letters enabling the FBI to keep records on the books being read by ordinary Americans who are not suspected of any crime. Leahy thought that he could placate them by throwing them a distraction.

Leahy put his support behind an amendment that would provide a few protections for libraries when it comes to Patriot Act Section 215 database seizures of records by the FBI. He said that ought to be enough for people who wanted restrictions of the Patriot Act. Sound good? Go read the previous paragraph over again, then, and think about it.

It’s not Section 215 seizures that are the problem when it comes to libraries. Senator Dick Durbin revealed today that the FBI has decided to use National Security Letters, not Section 215 powers, to seize private information about Americans’ reading habits from public libraries.

Guess how Senator Leahy arranged to get his bill, S. 1692, to extent the Patriot Act through committee – with no reform of National Security Letters in libraries. Leahy only put small reforms on a tool that the FBI doesn’t use anyway! The National Security Letters, the method that the FBI actually uses to run roughshod over the constitutional rights of people who use libraries, were untouched.

That he would engage in a tactic so transparently deceptive is a sign that Senator Patrick Leahy doesn’t have any respect for libraries, for the intelligence of the American people, or for our constitutional rights. Vermont voters, Patrick Leahy has embraced the dark totalitarian vision of George W. Bush. He doesn’t deserve to be re-elected to the United States Senate in 2010.