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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.'"
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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.
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.