Still On Guard

From IBD:

Posted 3/8/2006

Patriot Act: By renewing the key anti-terrorism law largely as President Bush wanted, Congress took a break from political games and showed its serious side.

The message of Tuesday's House vote, the final hurdle to renewal, came out a bit muddled in the initial reporting.

The Associated Press called the tally a "cliffhanger," which it was only in the sense that a special rule on expedited action required a two-thirds majority, which the measure topped by two votes. Failure to hit that mark would have complicated matters by delaying final approval, but it's clear that a solid majority was in favor of the bill.

This report and others also noted that Bush had to make concessions to defuse a filibuster threat in the Senate and win over skeptics. But what he gave up was minor; what he (and the country) gained was far more significant.

Until passage of the renewed bill, more than a dozen crucial provisions of the original 2001 Patriot Act were set to expire this Friday. These included sections permitting wiretaps related to terrorism, sharing of grand jury and foreign intelligence information, subpoenas of business records, seizure of voice mail, the use of pen registers (device-recorded phone numbers dialed from a particular line) and access to records and e-mails held by Internet service providers.

Under the bill passed this week, all such provisions are permanent except two: the power to subpoena tangible records (from libraries, for instance) and the power to issue roving wiretaps on any phone or computer that a suspected terrorist might use. These expire at the end of 2009.

Otherwise, there are few changes to existing law. For instance, the new bill makes clear that recipients of secret government requests for information — National Security Letters — can challenge them in court, and it bars the FBI from demanding the names of lawyers whom the recipients have consulted. These are refinements rather than fundamental changes.

We doubt if Bush won on political popularity, which isn't his strong suit right now. But his case had other things going for it. One was that the abuses so widely and loudly predicted by the ACLU and other hard-core Patriot Act critics haven't materialized. The original law was passed quickly but not written recklessly. It has harmed no innocents and has stood up well to legal scrutiny.

Then there was the political dilemma faced by the law's critics. It's one thing to rile up the Democratic Party base with anti-Patriot Act talk. It's quite another to go on record with a vote to weaken a law that is helping protect us from another 9-11. They couldn't have it both ways, and most Democrats in the Senate, at least, took the responsible course and voted for renewal.

We now hope America's enemies get the message of this vote — that America is dug in for a long war and is nowhere close to letting down its guard.