Friday, Jul 4, 2008
Right-wing activists team up with the left-wing ACLU to bash the PATRIOT Act. The Justice Department is not amused.
Apr 11, 2003 | One year ago, on April 10, 2002, influential conservative activist Grover Norquist was at the Arab American Institute Foundation's annual Kahlil Gibran Spirit of Humanity Awards dinner when he saw one of the more liberal members of Congress, Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis.
Norquist felt compelled to shake his hand. Feingold had been the only senator to vote against the USA PATRIOT Act, which Norquist opposed for giving the government too much power and robbing citizens of basic rights to privacy and civil liberties. Norquist had worked on curtailing some of the government's powers on the House side with then Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, and members of the American Civil Liberties Union. He assumed that the Senate -- then under Democratic control -- would make even further movements in that direction. It didn't. In fact, in Norquist's view, what came out of the Senate was even worse -- fewer protections for citizens, more power for government, more secrecy.
He asked Feingold why that was. At the very least, the Senate could have adopted the House version. Why didn't they?
Feingold pointed across the room, at then Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., also a dinner attendee. "Because Daschle told us to fold," Feingold said.
When asked about Norquist's story, Feingold's office referred a reporter to the senator's remarks on the floor of the Senate on Oct. 11, 2001, when he was denied the opportunity to offer amendments to the bill. That day, Feingold condemned Daschle for having "asked senators to not vote on the merits of" the legislation, "one of the most important civil liberties bills of our time."
With leaders like Daschle on the left, Norquist feels compelled to take up the fight he says he previously "always sort of assumed the ACLU and the liberals would take care of. I'm not sure ... we can count on our left-of-center friends."
There seems to be agreement on both sides of the aisle on that point. So the result was an ACLU forum Thursday billed as the "first time organizations from the left and right in Washington have come together publicly to discuss their growing common ground on civil liberties in the post-9/11 world," featuring not only Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform; but three other notable conservatives as well: David Keene, president of the American Conservative Union; Lori Waters, executive director of the conservative Eagle Forum; and outspoken former Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., a 1998 House impeachment manager. The four were invited by Laura Murphy, director of the ACLU Washington legislative office, and the event provided an interesting glimpse at not only some of the problems conservatives have with how the war on terror is being fought at home, but the limits of even their influence over the Bush White House.
This did not go over well at the Department of Justice. Responding to their criticism, Barbara Comstock, the DOJ's public affairs officer, took issue with their complaints, and also with the idea that the four represented the conservative movement at large. (It also probably didn't help that, according to Comstock, a Justice Department communications staffer was barred from attending the event, purportedly because the staffer didn't have press credentials. The ACLU denies that anyone was refused admission to the room, though reporters were given priority seating.)
Deeming the criticisms "inaccurate and intentionally misleading," Comstock noted that "time and time and time again what we have been doing has been held up in the courts," including the expanded authority to designate individuals as "enemy combatants" and the sharing of foreign intelligence surveillance information between intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
Critics have long been charging the Justice Department with moving to erode the checks and balances on law enforcement powers -- particularly regarding the ease with which it can be granted permission to conduct surveillance. The ACLU in particular has taken issue with provisions in the USA PATRIOT Act to permit some prison monitoring of attorney-client conversations, and the easing of judicial review requirements for wiretapping and other surveillance. But the department has continued doing what it deems right regardless; Attorney General John Ashcroft last summer rewrote DoJ guidelines to permit FBI agents to surf the Internet and attend public events -- like political rallies -- whereas beforehand they were prohibited from doing so.
Comstock also pointed out that the PATRIOT Act passed 357-66 in the House and 98-1 in the Senate. "So many of their statements demonstrate their lack of understanding of the law," Comstock said. "Aside from Bob Barr -- who did vote for the bill -- the other people involved are not lawyers. Grover is not a lawyer, nor should he play one on TV."
By way of explanation of the lopsided vote, the ACLU's Murphy quoted conservative Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, who said on a call-in show on Alaska Public Radio that the USA PATRIOT Act was the "worst act we ever passed. Everybody voted for it, but it was stupid, it was what you call 'emotional voting.'"
The conservative activists' main complaint seemed to focus on how broadly these laws meant to target suspected terrorists could be applied. "You're a suspect," Waters said at the beginning of her remarks, pointing to a reporter in the audience. "Everyone in this room is a suspect until it's proven that you're not." Barr said that the "approach reflected by many of these initiatives" would allow the government to "gather information on law-abiding citizens" in an unconstitutional fashion.
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