Senate votes to renew Patriot Act
WASHINGTON – After months of hard-fought negotiations, the Senate voted overwhelmingly Thursday to renew expiring portions of the Patriot Act after adding new privacy protections to the law spawned after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
By a vote of 89 to 10, senators voted to make permanent 14 of the 16 provisions originally set to expire at the end of 2005. The other two, which govern secret government records searches, were modified and extended for four years.
Many supporters of the bill said it marked an improvement over the original Patriot Act, which was designed to make it easier to thwart new terrorist attacks by expanding the government’s investigative powers and breaking down the traditional wall between domestic law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
But even many senators who voted for the renewal said that while the bill they approved was better than the original, it still fell short of offering all the civil liberties protections they had sought.
“Our support for the Patriot Act does not mean a blank check for the president,” said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.
The vote began the denouement of a difficult chapter of partisan brinkmanship, with the two houses of Congress – both Republican-controlled – in sharp disagreement for months over how to protect against terrorists and, at the same time, preserve civil liberties.
It was also a prized, if bittersweet, victory for the Bush administration, which won the anti-terrorism powers barely six weeks after the attacks on New York and the Pentagon – only to see its credibility tarnished by recent revelations that it had bypassed laws to conduct electronic surveillance on people in the United States without obtaining court orders.
“In 2001, we were viciously attacked by terrorists who care nothing for American freedoms and American values,” said Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., who led a two-month filibuster against the final version of the reauthorization bill. “Without freedom, we are not America. If we don’t preserve our liberties, we cannot win this war, no matter how many terrorists we capture or kill.”
Feingold’s filibuster, which was supported by a handful of Republicans, forced Congress to extend the original act twice while negotiations continued between the two branches of Congress and the White House. Earlier this week, the Senate passed a separate bill, negotiated by Sen. John Sununu, R-N.H., that effectively amended the reauthorization act to add a few additional protections.
Only 10 senators – nine Democrats, including Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, and one independent – voted against the renewal.
The House is expected to vote next week to adopt the Sununu compromise.
The two most controversial provisions of the act concern the government’s ability to demand access to private records – one known as the “library provision” and the second concerning “national security letters.”
The library provision permits the government to get secret court orders to search private records held by businesses, financial institutions, medical offices and other institutions as long as officials assert that the records are needed for an “authorized” investigation. Among the protections added into the final version of the bill is the right of those institutions to challenge whether the government acted in bad faith in demanding the records, although they could not require the government to provide facts or evidence connecting the demand to terrorist suspects.
In addition, the provision would apply to libraries only when they are acting as an Internet service provider, not in their traditional role of lending reading materials.
The original provision on “national security letters” – a kind of super-subpoena issued by a government agency instead of a court – forbids recipients to consult a lawyer about the demand or even to acknowledge they have received one. Under the final version of the bill, recipients can consult a lawyer without first informing law enforcement authorities.