Coalition salutes Congress for reenacting Patriot Act

The Coalition for Security, Liberty & the Law applauded today’s overwhelming 280-138 vote by the House of Representatives to reauthorize the Patriot Act. The House action followed a similarly lopsided show of bipartisan support for the Act last week in the Senate, which approved the reauthorization legislation by a margin of 89-10.

The latter was all the more remarkable for the reversal it represented in the Act’s fortunes following a successful Democrat-led filibuster of the bill last December. At the time, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) was moved to declare that, "We killed the Patriot Act."

The Coalition takes pride in its contributions to the reauthorization of this legislation preserving a number of the most critical tools used by America’s law enforcement and intelligence communities responsible for protecting the Nation from terrorist attack. These included:

• Circulating three Open Letters to the congressional leadership in September 2004, December 2005 and January 2006 signed by dozens of leading legal authorities and security policy practitioners urging the reenactment of the Patriot Act. Among the letters’ signatories were former Attorneys General Edwin Meese, Richard Thornburgh, William Barr and John Ashcroft, former National Security Advisor William P. Clark, former Secretaries of Defense Caspar Weinberger and James Schlesinger, former Deputy Attorney General George Terwilliger, former Solicitors General Judge Robert Bork and Theodore B. Olson, former CIA Director R. James Woolsey, and former U.S. Representative to the United Nations Jeanne Kirkpatrick.
• Collaborating with former Attorneys General Meese and Thornburgh in a press conference at the National Press Club on January 25 aimed at explaining the urgent need to preserve the Act’s threatened provisions and at correcting the many serious distortions of those provisions and their practical effects.
• Participating in separate strategy sessions on the Patriot Act and related national security issues with President George W. Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez.
• Sponsoring a television issue-advertising campaign featuring Debra Burlingame, sister of Capt. Charles "Chic" Burlingame, the American Airlines pilot of flight 77 which was hijacked and then crashed into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. The ads ran in the Washington market on February 2nd during Fox’s hit program, "24," and thereafter in markets in New Hampshire, Nebraska, Idaho and Alaska. Less than a week after the Coalition’s ads began airing, the four Republican Senators who had joined the filibuster in December – John Sununu (NH), Chuck Hagel (NE), Larry Craig (ID) and Lisa Murkowski (AK) – reached an agreement with the White House to support reenactment.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., President of the Center for Security Policy which sponsors the Coalition for Security Liberty and the Law, said today:

It is enormously gratifying that the Congress has been able to reenact the Patriot Act over the strident – and often unfounded – objections leveled against the original legislation by its critics. President Bush and the Act’s many supporters on Capitol Hill deserve great credit for staying the course, for articulating forcefully the case for reauthorization and for staving off demands for changes that would have grievously weakened its protections.

As a result, those responsible for keeping us safe will be far better prepared to contend with the real – and growing – threats against this country than would have been the case if various outspoken civil libertarians, Islamist sympathizers and apologists and their enablers had had their way.