“That’s all I’m going to say for now. Quack, quack.”
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
Getting a subpoena or a search warrant from a grand jury or a judge, respectively, is not a tough hurdle to climb, but the Bush gang believes it is. Thankfully, there is an election coming up next year that has extremist Republicans heading for the middle.
According to the Washington Post, the House handed President Bush the first defeat in his effort to preserve the broad powers of the USA Patriot Act, voting yesterday to curtail the FBI's ability to seize library and bookstore records for terrorism investigations. The surprise 238 to 187 rebuke to the White House was produced when a handful of conservative Republicans, worried about government intrusion, joined with Democrats who are concerned about personal privacy.
Bush has threatened to veto any measure that weakens the government’s powers to invade and intrude on your privacy.
Those upset about the vote resort to the following nonsense, from the same WAPO article, "Bookstores and libraries should not be carved out as safe havens for terrorists and spies, who have, in fact, used public libraries to do research and communicate with their co-conspirators," Assistant Attorney General William E. Moschella said in the letter.
What is really sad is that The American Civil Liberties Union called the vote a rare victory for civil liberties.
No comments:
Post a Comment