Librarians says Leahy let them down on Patriot Act
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Sen. Patrick Leahy |
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By Louis Porter Vermont Press Bureau - Published: October 12, 2009
MONTPELIER – Sen. Patrick Leahy is finding himself at odds with privacy-protecting librarians in the state — a group that usually has praise for Vermont's senior U.S. Senator and has often worked with him in the past.
Last week Leahy's Senate Judiciary Committee voted to approve an extension of pieces of the USA Patriot Act, major parts of which have long been criticized by those librarians and others interested in protecting civil liberties, including in some cases by Leahy himself.
But the bill approved in a bipartisan vote by the committee members and now headed to the Senate floor is very different – and much weaker according to some – than the original versions proposed by Leahy and others.
"I am feeling very disappointed," said University of Vermont Research Librarian Trina Magi, one of the most active librarians in Vermont on privacy issues. "I don't think the bill voted out of the Judiciary Committee comes close to meeting the hopes we had."
Among her concerns are that the bill does not do enough to restrict when and how the federal government can use extraordinary wire tapping and search approval measures such as "national security letters" designed for terrorism cases, which more frequently are applied in
ordinary crime investigations, according to federal reports.
"We were told years ago we need to get a Democratic majority in Congress and then things can change, then we were told we need to get a Democratic president and then things will change," Magi said. "They don't seem to be changing now."
Indeed some of Leahy's Democratic colleagues on his committee voted against the bill because they feel the additional protections and requirements it includes do not go far enough.
"I am left scratching my head trying to understand how a committee controlled by a wide Democratic margin could support the bill it approved today," said Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin in a statement, a committee member who had an alternative version of the legislation.
But in a telephone call from his Middlesex farmstead, Leahy said that such stands fail to recognize the realities of Washington.
The alternative to a compromise measure would have been to watch the Patriot Act be reauthorized as it stands without addition protections in the bill approved by his committee, he said. Indeed several Republicans on the committee voted against the measure because it went too far in restricting such investigations – and Feingold's amendment only received a couple of votes, Leahy pointed out.
"If something can only get two votes out of a 19-member committee it is probably not going to do extraordinarily well on the floor of the Senate," Leahy said. "My choice was to vote for something symbolic that would have gone nowhere and end up with something worse than what we have (now) or dramatically improve what we have. I choose to dramatically improve what we have," Leahy said.
"Nobody has done more in the judiciary committee to protect individual rights than I have," Leahy argued.
The committee voted 11-8 to accept the revision of the act. Three Democrats and five Republicans voted against it.
Leahy's past work on the issue is one of the things that makes the committee vote interesting. When the act was first passed in 2002, Leahy worked to put a "sunset" expiration provision in the original bill, which is what has brought several of the key measures in the legislation back before Congress now.
"We are very confident in Sen. Leahy, we know he shares our concerns. I am confident he was trying to get the best legislation he could," said John Payne, director of library and information services at St. Michael's College and president of the Vermont Library Association. But, he added, the bill as it came out of the Senate Judiciary Committee "was very watered down."
The chairwoman of the library association's committee dealing with intellectual freedom, Gail Weymouth, a Killington librarian, said that the Judiciary Committee bill doesn't offer very many additional protections for those concerned that the Patriot Act has resulted in a loss of privacy and individual rights – particularly given the reports showing how the provisions have been used.
"We appreciate what Sen. Leahy has tried to do, but it is very disturbing that the Judiciary Committee could just overlook what has been said," said Weymouth.
"It is being so abused that it is very disturbing," she said.
Allen Gilbert of the American Civil Liberties Union Vermont agreed with the librarians.
"The Founders were deeply worried about government gaining too much power. They saw from the British example that government, once given power, hardly ever yields it back," Gilbert said by e-mail.
"The experience with the Patriot Act is a reminder of that essential truth. Government never wants to relinquish power, even special powers given in times of emergencies."
"The revisions offered by the Judiciary Committee don't do enough to protect us, as ordinary citizens, from government's extended reach into our lives," he concluded.
But Leahy said that without the compromise bill approved by his committee, those concerned about privacy rights would face a Patriot Act without the reforms it includes.
They will be "a lot happier with (the reforms that were included) than what they would have had otherwise," Leahy said. "It would have had no new audits, we would have had no sunset on national security letters, we would have had none of the requirements to have some of the oversight that (Congressional) committees can do now."
Weymouth said that she and other supporters of changes to the Patriot Act are hoping the full Senate, and then the House of Representatives, will make more amendments to the bill when it comes to the floor.
"We are optimistic that something is going to change on the floor. We are looking for a miracle," she said.
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