Dude, Where's My Country_ - Michael Moore [46]
The leaders of the Democratic Party, seeking to help the Republicans achieve a unanimous vote, did everything they could to keep Feingold “in line” but he resisted voting for the legislation (and suffered the wrath of Democratic party leader Tom Daschle on the Senate floor). Feingold told Congressional Quarterly: “I don’t know if [dissenting] is dangerous or not, and frankly I don’t care. . . . If the worst thing that ever happened to me was that I got thrown out of office for this, I’d be a pretty lucky guy, considering what we’re up against here.”
USA Patriot Act is really a gross misnomer. This law is anything but patriotic. The “Patriot” act is as un-American as Mein Kampf. The name is part of a masterful plan meant to camouflage a stench thicker than Florida swamp water.
You can always read the law yourself if you have several days and a gaggle of lawyers at your disposal. You see, this law is not like other laws that read, in clear language, “you can do this” or “you can’t do that.” The Patriot Act is mostly about amending existing laws. There are 342 pages where it never really says what it is doing but rather refers you to hundreds of other passages in other laws written over the past hundred years. So, in order to read the Patriot Act, you need to have all the other laws written in the past century in order to see what sentence or phrase the Patriot Act is changing. For instance, here is how Section 220 of the USA Patriot Act reads:
SEC. 220. NATIONWIDE SERVICE OF SEARCH WARRANTS FOR ELECTRONIC EVIDENCE.
(a) IN GENERAL—Chapter 121 of title 18, United States Code, is amended—
(1) in section 2703, by striking ‘under the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure’ every place it appears and inserting ‘using the procedures described in the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure by a court with jurisdiction over the offense under investigation’; and
(2) in section 2711—
(A) in paragraph (1), by striking ‘and’;
(B) in paragraph (2), by striking the period and inserting ‘; and’; and
(C) by inserting at the end the following:
(3) the term ‘court of competent jurisdiction’ has the meaning assigned by section 3127, and includes any Federal court within that definition, without geographic limitation.’
(b) CONFORMING AMENDMENT—Section 2703(d) of title 18, United States Code, is amended by striking ‘described in section 3127(2)(A).’
Did you get all that?
That’s why, when anyone has challenged them, the Justice Department folks throw up their hands and urge “the public to read the actual language of the act” for clarification. There is no way to humanly do this.
On October 11, just a month after September 11, the Senate passed a version of the bill that was less tolerable to civil rights advocates than the House version, to be voted on the next day.
The Bush administration did not like the protections contained in the House bill and, with the speaker of the house, worked through the night to strip it of all the civil rights protections the House Committees had voted for. It was finally submitted at 3:45 a.m. When Congress showed up a few hours later to vote on it, they thought they were voting on the language agreed to the previous day. Instead, they voted on the bill whose few protections were gutted by Attorney General John Ashcroft the night before. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, few members of Congress actually read the final version of the act. It was perhaps the most reckless and irresponsible