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ACLU Drops Challenge Over Patriot Act
An anonymous reader writes, "The ACLU announced on Friday that they were dropping their case against the US Government over the highly contested section 215 of the Patriot Act. ACLU Associate Legal Director Ann Beeson stated: 'While the reauthorized Patriot Act is far from perfect, we succeeded in stemming the damage from some of the Bush administration's most reckless policies. The ACLU will continue to monitor how the government applies the broad Section 215 power and we will challenge unconstitutional demands on a case-by-case basis.'"
Reauthorized means, passed through congress again. :P I think it's significant that congress was dumb enough to let it get by again without more of a fuss. But then, i suppose this isn't a subject that anybody could raise without getting tarred and feathered.
There are lives at stake here!
George Walker Bush doesn't "reauthor" or "rewrite." George Walker Bush reauthorizesmatizes! How dare you misunderestimate him?!
One of the most amazing and amazingly unremarked upon aspects of these 9/11 commission hearings is the unanimity about the benefits of the Patriot Act. They don't often say it outright and the Democrats especially talk about how important "increased cooperation" between the CIA and FBI is. But the reality is that all of these "needed fixes" everyone keeps talking about are the Patriot Act. All of the "institutional barriers" that prevented us from "shaking the tree," all of the obvious things that should have been "checked out" etc are what the Patriot Act was designed to fix. It may not be perfect but I think it's hilarious that this seems to be the one bit of policy consensus from these hearings but few are willing to admit it.
There was a sunset provision in the Patriot Act which required it to be reauthorized through a vote in both houses. Hence, it was reauthorized with some changes.
Oh, you're right. The government would operate so much more efficiently if there were no descent. Let's just get rid of the judicial system and the legislature, too. They're just wastes of my hard earned dollars!
They won the case against the version of the PATRIOT act which has already expired. The judge didn't rule on the current version. It really wasn't a waste.
SIG: HUP
Isn't it possible that the ACLU's arguments were just bunk and the lawyers decided it was better to cut and run?
Or they see some change happening in Congress in the near future and decided that might be a better way to fix the problem.
What?
They dropped this case because they felt they needed to divert more of their efforts to protecting the Second Amendment.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Like the Republicans who currently control the purse strings wouldn't have found a way to increase government expenditures and take money out of your pocket.
You know, like wanting to prosecute Jose Padilla as a terrorist, holding this american citizen in jail for three years without counsel then dropping all terror related charges and finally settling on a charge of aiding terrorists in a civil, not military, court.
Seems that the government knew its case wasn't going to fly so it settled on lesser charges and claimed victory. After spending millions of dollars of taxpayer money on legal fees on a case they couldn't win.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
IANAL, but traditionally one drops a case if one is payed off, if one is likely to lose, or if one might lose and it's a bad test case for the issue. (The last applies if you're more concerned with the system than with one or two particular clients.) In this case, might the case have been dropped because of the possibility of it raising the "right to privacy" question before the supreme court? With the current court, such a question opens the door wide on abortion--there's no explicit right to privacy in the U.S. Constitution, and Roe v. Wade depends heavily on it. This may simply be far from the ideal court (or case) with which to revisit the question of that implicit right.
So maybe they did the math. Lose the right to privacy en masse or gain a little bit o' facism.
a story about "The Patriot Act" appeared on /. and nobody commented on it because they were afraid to?
Because the law DID exist when they filed the case. The reason it "doesn't exist" anymore is that there was a sunset (ie expiration) clause built into the bill. Congress could have chosen to reauthorize PATRIOT 100% exactly as it had been passed before. Instead, they rewrote sections of it to give back some of the civil rights they had previously taken. In all likelihood it was the ACLU's initial court victory that convinced the government that it needed to tweak section 215 to make it more constitutional.
A case doesn't HAVE to get to the SCOTUS to convince Congress to rewrite a law, you know. If they see the writing on the wall, they're free to change it before they get ordered to. And therein lies the victory here.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
After the first attack on the WTT, there were no more attacks on American soil. And that was done without the patriot act. So, by your level of proof, I guess that it "proves" that patriot act is not needed, just a pres. with a desire to prevent it.
To state that it has made us safer is up for debate as well. There is no proof that it done its job.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Right. What slays me is the regular folk who are so partisan in favor of one political party or the other. Give me a break! The party in power always grabs more power and the opposition tries to stop them. Why? Duh...to stay in power. When the winds of political change come, all they do they switch places.
People may originally get into politics for noble reasons but, eventually, it becomes about "doing business." And whether they are Republicans or Democrats it makes no difference. Eventually the media-government-business complex will select from among the candidates that they can "do business" with (sorry for ending my sentence with a preposition). What, you thought that you actually had a choice? Get real.
Like the old saw goes, power corrupts. But what gets me is these self-righteous A-holes who honestly think they they wouldn't be corrupted by it.
I would be very upset if the ACLU tried to prevent *individuals* from expressing their religious beliefs. However, I'm very much in favor of the ACLU's fight to remove *governmental* expressions of religion. The ten commandments that the ACLU fought against were not displayed in front of a (private citizen's) house, they were in front of a public courthouse. There was no "individual expression," it was a government sponsored display of religion. If the judge who erected the ten commandments had put them in front of his own house, I would have supported him.
Couldn't you use this argument to discontinue the wasteful and inefficient practice of holding elections?
I am not a crackpot.
It says "no person," not "no citizen" or "no non-combatant" or anything else. It means no person, period. That includes Osama bin Laden, Adolf Hitler, and Satan himself. In other words, your "clarification" is explicitly unconstitutional!
You betcha! What, are you afraid he'd somehow manage to win anyway? Don't you have any confidence in our laws and the ability of the US prosecution to put forth enough evidence to convict him?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The problem is that displays of crosses on the right of way of the road, which is government owned land, and the display of religious artifacts such as monuments to the ten commandments amount to an apparent endorsement, by the government, of religion, said religion almost always being Christianity. For example, I do not recall a single instance of seeing Shiva in a house of legislature, a voodoo altar at an accident site, or a monument to Ayn Rand on a courthouse lawn. When we talk about the US government's sponsorship of religion, It is Christianity first, last, and always.
Now, if some farmer wants to put up crosses in his field, or a church wants to put up religious monuments on church property, or any private citizen wants to erect a shrine to whomever, these are all examples of free expression by the citizens and as such, they are what the constitution seems to be worded to protect. It would be very difficult, I think, to read the first amendment as anything but encouraging the citizen and discouraging the government with regard to religious expression.
Remember the times: This country was founded by people who had been ruthlessly suppressed by the British government because the religion they followed was not that of the state. In 1789, when James Madison introduced the first tentative bill of rights, feelings were very strong that one religious sect or another must not gain religious control of the people through the mechanism of the government.
Madison's suggestion regarding religion read as follows:
That was whittled down to this:
This final version of this idea prevents the establishment of a national religion, and also prohibits government aid to any religion, even on an non-exclusive basis, or so the courts have said until very recently.
Now, there are state constitutions that read slightly differently; however, the supreme court has interpreted the due process clause of the 14th amendment to mean that states may not override this particular section of the bill of rights (the 1st amendment is part of the bill of rights.)
So this means that states shouldn't be putting religious symbols on road right of ways, either, nor should they be erecting monuments to any particular religion's artifacts, creeds, or personalities.
Remember: The bill of rights assigns rights to the people. It takes them away from the government. So you can't really argue that telling the government it can't erect religious artifacts suppressed the speech of the people based on the 1st amendment. It suppresses the ability of the government to tacitly or directly sponsor religion, and that is clearly what the intent of the framers was, not to mention the authors of the bill of rights. The problem, as always, is that when a government expresses a preference for a religion, those who do not follow that religion either are, or feel they are, being marginalized. This is a situation that it is very important to avoid, specifically so that no citizen's expression of religion is likely to be curtailed by concerns about how the government might react to that expression.
Finally, as the government's support of religion is almost exclusively Christian — crosses at the roadside, the ten commandments, Christmas displays, creches, etc. — it is clear that the current situation serves to discommode anyone who isn't a Christian. Therefore it would seem obvious, at least to me, that we have arrived at precisely the birthing of religious sponsorship the 1st amendment was designed to prevent us from getting to.
Y
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
"Its all find and dandy that the ACLU is trying to protect my civil liberties but when they are pushing to have a cross on the side of a road where someone has died be removed or pushing to have a stone ten commandments be removed, how are these civil liberties away from anyone?"
There's something going on if you can't tell the difference between different types of public land.
Roads are public in the COMMON sense - a cross memorialising someone who died on a particular stretch doesn't actually impose on anything besides things like "Hey, keep in mind some crap driver (maybe on something) killed a person here. Remember them, and, you know, heads up.". I would CERTAINLY remind my local ACLU chapter they have bigger fish to fry if they were going after any of these.
Courthouses are public in the sense of PUBLIC SECTOR. As in Government. This should go without saying, but I get the sensation it bears repeating here. Putting a stone tablature of the Commandments is problematic for a reason; namely that propping them in the rotunda of your local International House of Law acts as an implicit "We (the law) enforce this in these parts" (Which someone who actually cares about freedom of religion or right of consent SHOULD take issue with, or at least with the left half and possibly #7) and at worst serves as a state endorsement of religion (While not as bad as actually erecting a state religious sect, it's ALSO covered under 1st Amendment concerns).
The problem with your idea is that it makes sense.
For three years the government argued that he was actually on a scouting mission to set off a dirty bomb somewhere in the U.S yet failed to charge him with any criminal activity.
After those three years, and after spending who knows how much money trying to defend their case, they dropped all charges against him, released him from military jail and sent him to the civilian court system where they finally charged him, along with four others, with "conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim persons in a foreign country ... for the purpose of opposing existing governments and civilian factions and establishing Islamic states under Sharia (Islamic law), and material support for terrorism," according to the indictment. CNN link
My point was not whether the guy was guilty or not, but rather that government didnt' charge him with anything, simply held the guy for three years, and then spent money defending its actions against lawsuits filed by not only his attorney, but the ACLU and other organizations, then finally relented because the courts were starting to rule against its position. In other words, just like the crux of this article, they knew they couldn't win and so changed their position to make it seem like they had a victory but only after spending taxpayer dollars doing so.
I could just have easily used the issue of no-bid contracts by Halliburton and its subsidiaries which are costing the taxpayers millions, if not billions, of dollars in cost overruns, missing equipment, unsubstantiated work and other related matters. In fact, Bunnatine ("Bunny") Greenhouse, the top official at the US Army Corps of Engineers in charge of awarding government contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq, was demoted because she spoke out about the abuses of the bidding contract. Asia Times Online link and International Herald Tribune link.
I was only tyring to come up with other cases in which the U.S. government spent tons of money defending their actions and finally dropped the case which is similar to what the ACLU supposedly did to the taxpaer. Also, that the government doesn't need the ACLUs help in wasting taxpayer dollars considering that the Republican-led House, Senate and White House are doing very well on their own.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
They weren't stupid, they were trying to hold onto their jobs. Vote against PATRIOT Act and in the next election, your opposition will campaign on it because you obviously 'are against keeping us SAFE', and in some cases 'want the terrists to WIN'.
Remember how they got the Federal ID law passed? They tailgated it on the back end of an appropriation bill reputedly to supply body armor to the troops in Iraq. You couldn't vote against the rider without voting for the appropriation. Would YOU want to face re-election when the opposition says 'Hey, he voted AGAINST body armor for our troops!!!'?
What really needs to happen is stopping the practice of putting riders on bills at the last minute. You can submarine all KINDS of nasty shit with the current system. Problem is, I don't see this happening. Ever.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Yes, but it has been ruled several times that non-citizens are not held to the strictures of the Constituion or Bill of Rights by our Supreme Court - the Geneva Conventions used to be useful as they did cover world wide definitions of combatants / soldiers / POWs.
But the new law that Bush and Co. passed circumvented that and took the right to name who and what a combatant was away from the conventions and into the loving arms of the Executive & Congress.
So, the foreign terrorists were never under Haebeus Corpus, but were under the conventions. Now, they enjoy neither protection.
Also, for you budding home-grown US terrorists, you would be protected under Haebeus Corpus - but if the Executive declares you a combatant, there is NO RELIEF allowed for you to petition the court under the new law. Which means you can be denied Corpus / Due Process.
Who specifically are we at war with? That is to say, other than "the terrorists." Who do we have to kill or who has to surrender to end this war, bin Laden, the Taliban? The fact is, we are not at war in any meaningful sense of the word. We are at war only in the same sense that we are at war with drugs and poverty.
As I've said elsewhere, Roe vs. Wade is a prime example of why it's a really, really bad idea to accept bad jurisprudence just because it creates a good outcome in the short term.
Roe rests on a rather silly argument. Rather than using any number of very good justifications for enabling abortion -- such as the equal protection clause, or better yet, just tossing it back to the legislature until public pressure forced the creation of a real "Right to Privacy" amendment -- the USSC created a legal fiction. Beginning with Griswold vs Connecticut, they constructed a 'phantom right,' using what's now called the "penumbra argument." Basically they said that the right to privacy is unwritten but assumed, and that it's necessary in order for the functional implementation of other enumerated rights. It's a plausible enough argument, but certainly not airtight. Compared to the logic underlying most other high court decisions, it's got flaming hoops of assumptions to jump through. It's the Evel Knievel of opinions: on one hand there's where you are, and on the other side is the result you want, and then -- holy shit, look at it go -- it stretches between the two.
The justices voting for the majority, being very smart and well-read people, (in my opinion) voted the way they did less because they were actually convinced of the correctness of the penumbra argument on strict jurisprudential grounds, than because they thought that to allow abortion was the Right Thing To Do at the time, and they figured out a way to make it happen. There is some merit to this approach -- public opinion at the time was in favor and if you looked at trends over the past decade or two, it looked as if society was on a straight, predictable path towards social liberalization. If the court had ruled otherwise, many would have felt that the results were unjust. (And they would be partially correct: the Court would have been just, but it would have been wrong; fixing the relationship between justice and rightness being the proper domain of the Legislature.)
However, by acting on a results-focused, rather than principled or jurisprudential approach, the Court gave society a number of real rights -- things that average, everyday people count on, like the ability to get contraception or an abortion without consulting a judge -- but rested them on shaky, unstable foundations.
Now, all that needs to happen for these real-world abilities to disappear, is for the jurisprudential foundation to be undermined. And now, there is little chance of a national "Right to Privacy" being passed, as there might have been if Roe or Griswold had been decided differently and there had been a public outcry of 'injustice.' It might have taken longer to get the results that people wanted, but the ultimate right would have been more secure as a result, if it had come in the form of a law or Constitutional Amendment instead of a Court opinion.
Results-focused or social-utility "jurisprudence" is almost always a cop-out, a trading of short-term gains for long-term instability and unintended consequences. That we have begun to rely on them more and more is either a sign that the Legislative branch of government is not doing its job and forcing the Judicial to step in, or that the Judicial branch is overstepping. (Which one you think it is, is infinitely debatable.)
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