June 16, 2005, It's Everywhere You Want to Be
That hotbed of anti-American sentiment, the House of Representatives, voted to repeal one of the more "high-profile" and irritating provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act (passed by a chicken-shit Congress in the immediate aftermath of 9-11), removing the provision allowing warrantless searches of library and bookstore records. My understanding from no less an official than John Ashcroft was that this provision was not at all worrisome, because the federal government hadn't used it...
Apparently, the House, in an approving an amendment sponsored by Vermont Socialist Rep. Bernie Sanders (it did not exempt internet use a libraries... just what books got checked out), felt that there was more to fear from Alberto "Spanky" Gonzales than from Ashcroft. The President has offered a veto threat, lest the nation's libraries and bookstores be off-limits to warrantless searches by the Thought Police... apparently, the House of Representatives, with (by definition, a good number of GOP votes to get anything passed) disagreed, or just said "Go ahead, make our day..." knowing that, like the President's other brilliant legislative initiative, social security repeal, this is the sort of thing that bites individual members on the ass when they have to run at home...
Civil libertarians were a tad encouraged by this (Congress is also debating the continued operation of our gulag at Guantanimo and perhaps whether "disassembling" is in order.) A point I frequently make is "where were the Democrats"? but this measure obviously required overwhelming Democratic support, and some actual creativity in finding something that the President found troublesome that dozens of Republicans could sign on to... so even I am somewhat encouraged by this...
In short, it looks like we may have finally exhausted the statute of limitations on the President's ability to repeat the word "terrorist" like a mantra and get whatever the hell he wants... enough Republicans realize that unlike 2002, mere re-broadcasts of the events of 9-11-01 and repetition of the threat posed to us by some Arab regime won't be enough to secure Mid-term pickups...
Now, about that budget deficit...