“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.
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.
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.