California Conservative

Patrick Leahy issued this whiny press release about President Bush calling them on the filibustering Patriot Act. Here’s a sampling:

Instead of playing partisan politics and setting up false attack ads, the White House should join in trying to improve the PATRIOT Act. Our goal is to mend it, not to end it. If the White House is unwilling to fix it now, they should support the Sununu-Leahy three-month extension, which 40 senators have cosponsored, to give us to time to make this a better bill. We ask the President to reconsider his opposition to briefly extending the expiring provisions of the PATRIOT Act until these improvements are made.

Sen. Leahy, get serious. Your leader, Sen. Reid even went so far as to say last Friday that they’d killed the Patriot Act. Here’s an exchange from Fox News Sunday:

REID: Think of what happened 20 minutes ago in the United States Senate. We killed the Patriot Act. (Applause)

WALLACE: Senator, is that really something to celebrate?

REID: Of course it is. The fact is that I voted for the original Patriot Act, it was the right thing to do, and the Patriot Act that I talked about there, at least some semblance of it, came out of the judiciary committee in the Senate unanimously, it passed the Senate unanimously. It was an improvement over what we had. It was sent to the House of Representatives and came back in a fashion that I thought was very bad, as did a bipartisan group of senators. Now, keep in mind what we’re talking about. 2003, New Year’s Eve in Las Vegas, hundreds of thousands of people come to Las Vegas. And do you know that those people that came to Las Vegas had their credit cards looked at; they had what rooms they stayed in, what cars they rented? Now, what happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas, but not in this instance. It’s in some federal data bank. That’s what the Patriot Act is doing to the American people, and we have to make sure that Big Brother doesn’t take over this country.

Sen. Leahy, it’s obvious that you, and your political party, don’t give a damn about protecting us from terrorists bent on killing us. You’re pitbulls on Constitutional rights, and that’s good to a point, but you’re wimps when it comes to attacking the underpinnings of the terrorists that hit us.

It’s also obvious that Sen. Reid and the supporters were giddy that they’d polished off the Patriot act once and for all. If that’s your idea of mending it, not ending it, then that’s some of the most vacant logic I’ve ever heard.

You say that President Bush and Congress should accept a 3 month extension of the current Patriot Act so you can “mend it, not end it.” Why? You lost when the conferees agreed to the compromise that’s being filibustered. In light of the fact that you lost your version, why should we be held hostage to a procedural tactic?

Let’s turn this on its head: If your version of the bill is so superior, then why didn’t your bill get majority support? If it didn’t get majority support, what makes you think you can get majority support anytime in the near future? If it won’t get majority support anytime soon, why are we holding up the passage of the Patriot Act compromise? Isn’t it incumbent on you to accept the compromise rather than killing this Patriot Act?

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRing

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 20th, 2005 at 10:09 am and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, Homeland Security, Liberals, Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.