The Senate today voted to extend the PATRIOT Act for another year, as requested by the Obama Administration. The vote came without any debate, and by voice vote so that individuals did not have to make their position public.
Perhaps the most galling part of the vote was that not a single privacy provision was added to the bill, despite Congressional Democrats promising such reforms.
Even the Obama Administration seemed to have resigned itself to the privacy provisions, demanding only that they not weaken the president’s powers. In the end however, the Senate’s Democrats backed off entirely and approved the bill exactly as-is.
The bill will now move into the House of Representatives, where the Judiciary Committee has been seeking to remove the “lone wolf” section of the act entirely. In an election year it will be interesting to see if the House Democrats are willing to press hard for civil rights protections against an administration which has insisted they be, at best, seriously limited.
What very few congressional Democrats there are who have any redeeming value are all in the House. The Senate is 100 tools. The only Republican worth a damn is Ron Paul.
Hope and Change!
Obama supporters: What do you think of your man now? And your party? Care to conjure up another set of excuses?
Hey, they took a chance. What was the alternative? A senile war failure?
If anyone were in doubt here is clear evidence that Obama’s campaign alleged interests in addressing the legitimate grievances of the electorate was nothing less than the empty blather of a flim-flam man. The TSA cannot protect the contents of airline luggage from theft yet, they and the other security services want and get more and more intrusive powers.
Louis, this is when "too big to fail" comes into focus. The biggest and most expensive military and intelligence agencies in the world couldn't or wouldn't stop what happened but they get rewarded for their failure. Talk about golden parachutes.
Now, can there be any more doubt? The corporate-controlled Democrats and Republicans in the Senate have taken an oath to destroy and gut the Constitution (especially that portion known as the Bill of Rights) in order to deny natural and god-given rights to anyone they perceive as enemies to their criminal agendas, be they foreigners or American citizens. And don't expect anything better out of the traitors "serving" in the House. The Constitution, in the eyes of the American ruling establishment, is now a dead letter. Americans no longer live in a nation of laws that respects and guarantees natural and god-given rights; Americans now find themselves living in a police state and we all are now subject to the arbitrary whims of evil men. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and every other tyrant that ever lived are, at this moment, down in hell laughing their heads off. Fascism has finally come to America. Listen, can you not hear the souls of all those who died for human liberty and freedom sobbing with grief?
It is surprising that a state also advanced, powerful and supposedly democratically adopt a text vote without debate.
Is there no specific procedure that prevents that? Control over the adoption of a text? Or perhaps the text was it perfect … it seems to me that Patrioct act is quite as restrictive legislation but i'm only a french jurist…