For the week of July 2 - 8, 2003

Look who’s revolting against ‘Patriot Act’?

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"I am cosponsoring the Freedom to Read Protection Act, designed to protect libraries, bookstores and ultimately citizens from government investigating what we read. I also am working on additional legislation with organizations interested in rolling back the Patriot Act’s more egregious trespasses."

Is that a left-leaning Democratic liberal speaking before the American Civil Liberties Union’s national convention?

Nope.

It’s actually the July 4 statement of Idaho’s conservative Republican First District Congressman C.L. (Butch) Otter, one of a growing number of Democrats and Republicans frightened by powers given to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft in the so-called Patriot Act.

Panicked by Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York City and the Pentagon, and succumbing like sheep to slick White House marketing of legislation with the glitzy, flag-waving title of "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required To Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act" (first letters form "USA Patriot"), Congress passed the legislation in October 2001.

Otter voted against the bill, saying "my conscience would not allow it, its constitutionality is questionable and my constituents oppose it."

Second thoughts are spreading in Congress not only because members have finally read all 1,016 sections of the bill covering thousands of pages, but because of how President Bush’s autocratic attorney general has treated civil liberties with contempt--rounding up hundreds of people he merely deems "terrorism suspects," holding them incommunicado like a Third World tyrant, refusing counsel, then months later releasing or charging them with petty immigration violations. His FBI agents also have been checking libraries to see who’s reading what.

Otter, among others, wisely sees this as blatantly hostile to the Bill of Rights, and wants to roll back Ashcroft’s power.

"We celebrate our freedoms," Otter writes in his Independence Day message, "and the sacrifices made by those who came before to ‘secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.’ But are we doing our best to honor those sacrifices if we allow our freedoms to be eroded? Surely the Framers did not intend the Bill of Rights to apply only when it is convenient."

Despite heavy-handed indifference to liberties, Attorney General Ashcroft (with President Bush’s blessing) wants the Patriot Act expanded to give him more power.

To what end? The power to round up political critics whom Ashcroft once condemned in testimony before Congress as aiding U.S. enemies? Or, to immunize President Bush against congressional action—such as impeachment—if he’s found to have misused intelligence agencies for politics, as did President Nixon during Watergate?

In pre-Bush times, Republicans had a tradition of revolting against the sort of expanded authoritarianism Ashcroft demands.

Britain’s King George III used such power, until American colonists revolted and created a nation built on liberties and law.

Under cover of the misnamed Patriot Act, attorney General Ashcroft (with President Bush’s tacit approval) seems willing to revert to tactics of King George rather than honor freedoms wrought by bloodshed of colonists in 1776.

 

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