WASHINGTON - "I want you to protect the Constitution," expressed a sign carried by a young woman protester at the September 12th Washington D.C. Tea Party. Where was that woman in October 2001, when the USA Patriot Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush? That's when she should have expressed her concern about protecting the Constitution.
Almost eight years later, as the Senate Judiciary Committee met Sept. 23, 2009, to consider reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act, Sen. Al Franken (D.-Minn.) read the 4th Amendment to the Constitution in the presence of a Justice Department lawyer who was arguing in favor of reauthorization of the Act.
As he read, Sen. Franken put an emphasis on, "...no Warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized," then asked the attorney how, under the 4th Amendment could the roving wiretap provision of the Patriot Act be considered legal. This is only one of the multitudes of concerns raised by the Patriot Act, and only one of many reasons that this Act should die well-deserved death on Dec. 31, 2009.
The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001, otherwise known as The USA Patriot Act, was passed in the Senate and the House and was signed into law by Pres. George W. Bush on Oct. 26, 2001. While it may seem that the Act was passed as a response to the 9/11 attacks, many of its provisions were in the works before that fateful date. After the attacks, the Act, with its Constitution-gutting provisions, was passed with little debate and little opposition. In fact, many representatives and senators admitted to having not read the Act before it was passed.
This legislation expanded law enforcement agencies' ability to spy on citizens and permanent residents without also expanding the Constitutional checks and balances that protects citizens and permanent residents from law enforcement abuses. The USA Patriot Act effectively gutted the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
Specifically, Section 215 of the Act gives the FBI power to spy on any of us, to monitor the books we check out from the library or the merchandise we buy from a web site, to track the web sites we visit, to wiretap our phone calls, to investigate us when we write a letter to the editor critical of the government or when we participate in a protest against government policies, all without probable cause or a warrant.
Right after the USA Patriotic Act became the law of the land, many members of the Peace and Social Justice Center of South Central Kansas took to the streets to demonstrate against it and against the Iraq War, a war based on distortions disseminated by the Bush administration. Who knows how many Peace Center activists were and still are under investigation? Most of us have known from the time we first took up peace and justice activism that we would run afoul of the government and many of us probably have a file buried somewhere in a building in FBI headquarters. I signed my first anti-war statement when I marched in 1969 against the Vietnam War, and I knew then the risk that entailed. This, however, is not the point.
The point is this: Where were those anti-government folks and their protests when the government really was taking away their civil rights? I'll tell you where they were. They were driving by our demonstrations throwing rocks and garbage at us. They were calling us traitors and un-American. They were standing firmly behind the Bush administration, its illegal war, and its destruction of the Constitution.
Now we have the spectacle of people at Town Hall meetings, shouting down Congressmen and women who are trying to explain the complexities of health care reform and other legislation. Self-identified Tea Party patriots participate in marches in which they carry signs depicting President Obama as a Socialist, or a Fascist, or as Adolf Hitler, the most heinous person ever to live in modern times. All this noise and nastiness is based on nothing more than Obama and his administration's attempts to bring stability to an economy ruined by the policies of the Bush administration and the attempts to reform a health care system that is bankrupting individuals and the country as a whole.
I have to speculate that the USA Patriot Act is too abstract for Teabaggers to get a handle on. It is long, legalistic, and technical, and one has to spend some time researching it to figure out what is in it. If those Tea Party participants ever stopped to think that their actions are not protected under the post-Patriotic Act Constitution, they might realize that they do indeed have a reason to protest. Otherwise, their Tea Party is, in Shakespeare's immortal words from Macbeth, "...a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing."
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