In fact, the Patriot Act has found its way into so many of Bush’s speeches that White House spokesman Scott McClellan was asked during a press conference late last week if the president was making a campaign issue out of it. McClellan responded that Bush believes the renewal is “a very important priority” and will continue to talk about it. “There’s some clear choices on this issue, I think, in this election,” added McClellan.
That’s definitely the way Bush supporters see it. The president has been promoting renewal of the act, which he calls “vital” in the war on terrorism, as part of his national security platform. He’s also criticizing Kerry for wanting to change parts of the legislation–something Bush claims could thwart the country’s ability to fight terrorism.
But in reality Kerry is not so far from Bush in his views on the Patriot Act. The Massachusetts senator claims he not only stands by his vote for the legislation, but that he authored most of the law’s money-laundering provisions and thinks some aspects of the act actually need strengthening (like improving intelligence information sharing). However, the two do differ on which provisions should be renewed, and which revised.
Bush has strongly and publicly urged lawmakers to renew all the provisions of the Patriot Act set to expire next year. Kerry, meanwhile, has said he wants to scale back some sections he deems as being too invasive. Kerry has raised concerns in particular about how enhanced police powers granted under the Patriot Act–like the increased ease in obtaining wiretaps, search warrants and access to personal information, for example–have been interpreted under Attorney General John Ashcroft. Kerry accuses Ashcroft of using those expanded police powers “in secret ways and for political purposes” by authorizing his agents to monitor church meetings and political rallies, for example, “without any cause and without the need to get approval.” He has even pledged that if he is elected president he will “end the Era of John Ashcroft” in his first 100 days and outline a plan for protecting individual liberties while stepping up the war on terrorism. “Ashcroft is such a lightning rod,” says Gregory Treverton, senior policy analyst at the RAND corporation and former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council during the first Clinton administration.
Nonetheless, Treverton feels that the act itself will have less effect on how voters cast their ballots in November. “We will have some debate about the Patriot Act, but I don’t think there is likely to be a lot of political heat,” he says. “There are some hot buttons, but on the whole most people I speak to say, if I am not doing anything wrong, I have nothing to fear…They are so concerned about terror threat that the expansion of police and intelligence powers is seen as being warranted.” Treverton may be right, but the expansion of those powers does have civil libertarians, Constitutional lawyers and even some law enforcement officials concerned. Some conservative Republican lawmakers have also joined Democrats in criticizing portions of the law as being too intrusive and are now threatening to allow the provisions to expire. “I don’t think it is a partisan issue, and I don’t think it should be,” says M. David Gelfand, a professor of Constitutional law at Tulane Law School. “There are some provisions in the act that are extremely questionable, that undercut our rights totally unnecessarily, and not only don’t provide us with security, but actually have negative effects on our security by wasting law enforcement resources…We need to be especially cautious about how much security we’re really buying with any of these provisions and what price we are paying to get it.”
A new survey of criminal justice and legal experts conducted by Thomson Wadsworth (a publishing division of Thomson Learning) found that many recognized analysts in the field have similar concerns about the Patriot Act. The vast majority (95 percent) of the 65 professors, institute researchers and other experts surveyed said the act was passed too quickly without considerable thought on how it might impact existing laws or public policy. And about three-quarters of those surveyed feel that some provisions in the Patriot Act violate individual rights. “My biggest overall concern for an act as sweeping and as important as this one is that it wasn’t vetted for very long. There wasn’t a lot of national discussion,” says Gary LaFree, professor of criminology and criminal justice and co-founder of the Democracy Collaborative at the University of Maryland in College Park, one of the respondents. “You end up seemingly being on the side of Saddam if you say, wait a second here. [But] this act has some implications that we think we should think through a little more.
" Some of the most controversial provisions are those that allow law enforcement agencies to delay giving notice when they conduct a search; allow searches of someone’s financial, medical and even library records without that person’s knowledge or consent (if the government says it is doing so to protect against terrorism); and an expansion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that allows the issuing of warrants in some cases to conduct secret searches of people’s homes–either electronically or physically–and to seize personal property. “On the surface, it [the act] would appear to be extremely effective. But in practice, critics would argue that the act has not been effective because it threatens civil liberties,” says Jonathan White, executive director of the Homeland Security Initiative at Grand Valley State University and author of “Defending the Homeland : Domestic Intelligence, Law Enforcement, and Security,” released in paperback earlier this year by Thomson Wadsworth. “[That’s] because the information gathered under a FISA umbrella may not be admissible in court and the courts may very well overturn what the legislature has passed, and because the Patriot Act could be misapplied.”
Supporters of the act point out that many new provisions make it easier for intelligence and law enforcement agencies to work together and to share information in investigations–something that the government was criticized for not doing before the September 11 attacks. Bush recently cited the Patriot Act as helping to facilitate the criminal cases against the so-called Lackawanna Six, a group of Yemeni-Americans who were accused of supporting terrorism by attending Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan.
Whether Bush’s unwavering support for the legislation will help or hurt him in the election is unclear–especially since Kerry did help to pass the legislation (though he now says parts of it need to be fixed). But so far, the president’s strong stance seems to be resonating with voters. A Washington Post-ABC News poll released last week shows Bush’s numbers have gone up in the past two weeks, putting him ahead of Kerry by 48 percent to 43 percent. And a Gallup poll for CNN and USA Today out early last week shows Bush leads Kerry 50 percent to 44 percent among likely voters. That jump comes despite the recent rise in deaths among both service members and U.S. civilians in Iraq as well as criticism about Bush’s handling of the war on terror from witnesses testifying before the 9/11 commission.
Given the current troubles in Iraq and the criticisms lobbed at Bush during the 9/11 hearings, LaFree says he is surprised by the gains Bush has made recently in the polls. “But maybe people think it’s a bad time to change leadership,” he adds. “Bush was certainly decisive and maybe a number of people really appreciate that.” The same Gallup poll also showed that voters, by a 2-1 margin, thought Bush would do a better job on terrorism than Kerry would. And 56 percent of the respondents said Bush says what he means and means what he says, while only 44 percent said the same of Mr. Kerry. The big question now is whether they’ll still feel that way in November.
