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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
As the president signs the anti-terrorism bill, the only senator who voted against it speaks out, calling it "big government taking a big grab of power."
Oct 27, 2001 | Disappointed but still defiant, Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wisc. -- the Senate's lone dissenter against the sweeping antiterrorism legislation signed into law by President Bush Friday -- expressed his regrets on Friday about everything, from the name to the debate to the content of the bill.
"I would have loved to have voted for it," says the two-term liberal Democrat. "But my view of my job is to do what I think is right, not to be cowed by the name of the bill."
The bill's name -- the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, with its handy USA PATRIOT acronym -- was just one of the many aspects Feingold finds offensive. "The implication is of course that if you don't support the bill you're not patriotic," Feingold says in a phone interview from Milwaukee, where he was interviewing U.S. attorney and federal judgeship candidates. "But I will not take second place to anyone when it comes to patriotism."
The bill gives law enforcement a number of new and enhanced powers, allowing wiretaps to be focused on the individual suspect rather than the phone, increasing punishments for terrorist activities and permitting subpoenas of e-mail records, and expands the amount of materials law enforcement officials can share with one another.
Feingold's primary problems with the bill revolve around the expansion of existing investigative tools. One provision expands law enforcement's ability to search a home or an office without notifying a suspect beforehand because it could "seriously jeopardize" an investigation. Such notifications are important to protect a suspect's basic Fourth Amendment rights, Feingold contends. Feingold is also troubled by another provision that allows the deportation of noncitizens who are affiliated with groups engaged in "terrorist activity," which Feingold finds too vaguely defined, arguing that Operation Rescue, Greenpeace and even the Northern Alliance could fall under these definitions. He argues that noncitizens should be subject to the same standard of evidence for deportation or detention that American citizens enjoy.
Many of Feingold's objections also center on the standard to allow surveillance in foreign intelligence investigations. Federal law allowed for a lower standard than for normal criminal investigations as long as intelligence gathering was the "primary purpose." The Bush administration wanted to lower that standard to "a purpose"; Senate Democrats changed this to a "significant purpose," which Feingold still disagrees with. He thinks the lowering of the standard is essentially an invitation for the FBI to engage in surveillance even if the primary purpose is actually a criminal investigation and not terrorism. Now, Feingold says, the government will be able to obtain business, personal and medical records of anyone in any investigation of terrorism or espionage.
Feingold is in the teeniest of minorities in these concerns, however.
The bill passed the House on Wednesday by a vote of 356-66. It passed the Senate Thursday by a vote of 98-1. President Bush signed it into law at 10:57 a.m. Friday at a ceremony featuring both Democratic and Republican congressional leaders.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, which negotiated the USA PATRIOT Act with the Bush administration, told reporters that "we know that there were some gaps in law enforcement as it deals with terrorism, especially terrorism on our shores," and the bill "plugged those gaps." Law enforcement was hampered by laws that harked back to the "Dillinger and Willie Sutton days," while now the nation is better prepared for the threats of the new millennium, Leahy said. "This bill was carefully drafted and considered," Bush said, labeling the bill "essential not only to pursuing and punishing terrorists, but also preventing more atrocities in the hands of the evil ones." The legislation, Bush said, "met with an overwhelming -- overwhelming agreement in Congress, because it upholds and respects the civil liberties guaranteed by our Constitution."
That's not how Feingold sees it, of course. The Democrat -- who is sometimes criticized by his colleagues as being too puritan in his goals and sanctimonious in his manner, though his fans find him principled and uncorruptible -- says that he supports most of the bill, just not a few key provisions that he thinks constitute "big government taking a big grab of power."
