Because extending certain provisions of the Patriot Act before they expired at midnight last night was deemed so essential to national security, the extension legislation was, of course, left until the last minutes, thanks to the political paragons of Congress.
Republicans wanted a permanent extension. Democrats didn't.
They settled on June 1, 2015.
After a feud about guns, the four-year Patriot Act Sunset Extensions of 2011 passed in the Senate Thursday 72-23.
Then, with barely 300 minutes to spare, the House passed the same measure, 250-153. Our colleague Lisa Mascaro carefully chronicles some of the bill's provisions, what all the government spooks can peek into now still with secret federal court approval.
Barack Obama, who is in Europe, signed it into law shortly before the provisions were set to expire at midnight. A White House aide said he used an "auto pen", which replicates his signature.
Obama acted shortly after the Republican-led House of Representatives and the Democratic-led Senate approved the bill overwhelmingly. It passed the House, 250-153, hours after it cleared the Senate, 72-23.
Democrats and some Republicans favoured more protections of civil liberties in the legislation. But congressional leaders, facing the midnight deadline and possibly short on votes, agreed to a four-year, unaltered extension of the provisions to track suspected terrorists.
The provisions empower law enforcement officials to get court approval to obtain "roving wiretaps" on suspected foreign agents with multiple modes of communications, track non-US nationals suspected of terrorism, and obtain certain business and even library records.
"Although the Patriot Act is not a perfect law, it provides our intelligence and law enforcement communities with crucial tools to keep America safe," said the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid.
"The raid that killed Osama bin Laden also yielded an enormous amount of new information that has spurred dozens of investigations yielding new leads every day.
"Without the Patriot Act, investigators would not have the tools they need to follow these new leads and disrupt terrorist plots.
According to aides, Obama had to be awakened early Friday, which was after the deadline by French beach resort time.
The commander-in-chief reportedly reviewed the provisions carefully and ordered his signature affixed to said bill.
Wait! What? The president of the United States didn't actually sign it himself??
Remember, back in 2009 when Obama was so excited about the economic stimulus bill that didn't really work as well as Joe Biden promised everybody? And so Obama flew Air Force One out to Denver with the legislation to personally sign it there, for some reason?
Well, here's one of the dirty not-so-little secrets of American politics. Yes, the....
...Declaration of Independence was actually signed in person by everyone using a feather. Perhaps 200 copies were printed that night and only 26 are known to survive. We'll leave it to Nicolas Cage to find the original original.
The modern truth, however, is that a very large number of the very large number of presidential signatures that leave any White House on photos, letters, mementoes, books, are actually fake. False. As phony as a Donald Trump presidential candidacy.
Their proposed changes cleared Leahy's committee, but neither man was able to bring them up for a full Senate vote.
Leahy said: "The extension of the Patriot Act provisions does not include a single improvement or reform, and includes not even a word that recognises the importance of protecting the civil liberties and constitutional privacy rights of Americans."
But the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, said: "The invaluable terror-fighting tools under the Patriot Act have kept us safe for nearly a decade, and Americans today should be relieved and reassured to know that these programs will continue."
The Senate had been tied up in procedural knots over the measure for days. It moved after pressure from the director of FBI, Robert Mueller, and the national intelligence chief, James Clapper, who wrote to congressional leaders, saying that renewal of the provisions was vital to national security.
No comments:
Post a Comment