Patriot Act Set to Pass
Signalling that the fight over renewing the Patriot Act is in its final stretch, House Speaker Denny Hastert announced his approval of the compromise struck yesterday to get the last 4 Republicans on board for renewing it.
With all 55 Senate Republicans on board for renewing the Patriot Act, approval is all but assured. When the Democrats filibustered the renewal just before Christmas, they hid behind the fig leaf excuse that it was a bipartisan group that filibustered. That last bit of ‘foliage’ has now been stripped from them.
“I think they (the changes in the bill) were enough to make sure we can protect the American people,” Hastert told reporters at Cambridge, MD, speaking of three revisions that the white House and Senate GOP holdouts announced on Thursday. The House “should move forward with it as soon as the Senate” acts, he said.
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The Senate’s second-ranking Democrat, Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois, is also among its supporters. Judiciary Committee member Sen. Dianne Feinstein, (D-CA), also said the bill had been substantially improved by the changes and she would vote for it.
Feinstein’s comments are laughable. The changes have been described as window dressing and as cosmetic in nature by Fred Barnes, Charles Krauthammer and Mort Kondracke on last night’s roundtable. There weren’t substantial changes made, Mort said, saying that they were more like tweaking.
But Sen. Russell Feingold, (D-WI), a leader in opposing the act, said he would continue to fight it. He said the deal did not provide meaningful judicial review of gag orders because such review can only take place after a year has passed and can only be successful if the recipient proves the government acted in bad faith.
I can’t say that I’m surprised by Feingold’s opposition because he’s basically been opposed to anything done to improve homeland security, starting with his opposition to the Patriot Act but also including his pit bull diatribe against AG Gonzales and the NSA terrorist intercept program.
Cross-post at LetFreedomRing
February 12th, 2006 at 9:04 am
I don’t get Feiggold. I used to think he was an intelligent, reasonable man, but he now acts like a moonbat blind to the Islamic threat. He has become irrational and obsessed with this ‘civil rights and privacy’ issue.