Tom Cotton leads the charge on the Patriot Act
by digby
You've undoubtedly heard that certain elements of the Patriot Act are scheduled to expire in June. What you may not have heard is that Tom Cotton is leading the charge to renew it --- and add more powers while he's at it. I wrote about this for Salon over the week-end:
One of the more disturbing quotes of recent days (and that’s saying something) is this one:
Obviously, the idea that any insight can be gleaned from the freshman senator — who famously made the Republican caucus look like a bunch of bumbling fools when they signed on to his embarrassing letter to Iran — is the disturbing part of that comment. When I described Cotton as “a leading light on the right in foreign policy and national security,” back in February, I thought I was making a little joke. But this man, who has been in the Senate for about three months, really has become the go-to expert on all things related to foreign boogeymen.
But as Ed Kilgore noted in an interesting article last week, this is about more than just Tom Cotton. It is part of an overall GOP turn backwards on national security, which was signaled pretty clearly in the 2014 midterms.
Kilgore writes:
I didn’t write about this a whole lot in my own book on the 2014 midterms, but did discuss it: towards the end of that cycle Republican Senate candidates—led by Scott Brown, who ran a surprisingly strong race in NH—really started demagoguing about terrorists pouring into the country via “porous” borders or in response to the general surrender-money [sic] tendencies of the Obama administration. And since the elections, I think we are all aware that Republican pols and rank-and-file alike are increasingly more likely to favor a re-invasion of Iraq or a military confrontation with Iran.
This has made one of the big developments of the previous couple of years—the emergence of a bipartisan coalition in Congress aimed at curtailing Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) surveillance programs at NSA and elsewhere—very, very fragile.
Personally, I thought that coalition was always pretty fragile since it mostly consisted of about six libertarian cranks and a bunch of liberal Democrats, but it was something. And even more than that, the general revulsion among the public over the way the wars had been conducted under Bush and Cheney and the urgent attention required for domestic affairs in the wake of the financial crisis made national security a weak, second-tier issue for Republicans — a first in the modern era. But it was always only a matter of time before they got their hawkish mojo back, and there is no time better than when the Democrats are likely to be running a woman for president. (As I have written here before, that fits perfectly into their decades-long storyline about “feminized” Democrats that goes all the way back to the era of long-haired hippies.)
Read on to see how Cotton and company are planning their attack.
Blue America sent a letter to its members this morning. This is part of it:
There was a lot of talk at one time about a new coalition of civil libertarian Republicans and civil libertarian Democrats coming together to reform these programs now that the nation is aware of what they're actually doing. Sadly, the number of civil libertarians in the Republican Party can fit in a small Smart Car and the civil libertarians in the Democratic Party are not a majority. And with uber-hawk Tom Cotton waving the “national security” banner we can be sure the Republicans are intent upon squelching any thoughts of reform.
This is why it's so important for Democrats to elect more real progressive civil libertarians to congress. We cannot count on this tiny faction of libertarian Republicans, led by their hypocritical grandstanding leader Rand Paul, to ever provide the numbers required to roll back the surveillance state. Hawkish national security and authoritarian police policies are in the modern GOP's DNA.
This is going to require a majority progressive Democratic Party led by people like Congresswoman Donna Edwards who is now running for the Maryland Senate seat currently held by retiring Senator Barbara Mikulski. Edwards has been consistent on these issues throughout her career in congress. For instance, in 2014 she voted against the USA Freedom Act, originally conceived as a reform measure which was later gutted by the Republicans in committee. She issued this statement at the time:
“After much deliberation I opposed the USA Freedom Act because I continue to believe it doesn’t strike the necessary balance between protecting our national security and protecting our 4th Amendment rights. Without question, national security issues are critically important, and I applaud all those who work at the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, and others for their dedication to duty and professionalism. We must provide them with the means to gather the information necessary to keep America safe. However, we cannot allow the pursuit of that goal to infringe on the civil liberties that we, as Americans, hold sacred and fought so hard to defend.”
"Yet again we have a clear difference between myself and my opponent in the Democratic primary in NJ-01. Today, Donald Norcross voted in support of the Protecting Cyber Networks Act, a bill that is a surveillance bill disguising itself as a cyber-security bill. This bill gives companies a significant expansion in their ability to monitor customers' online activities. It allows them to share vaguely defined 'cyber threat indicators,' which then automatically go to the NSA. The NSA is then authorized broad law enforcement rights that could stretch beyond cyber-security. This chain of events is a slippery slope. I totally disagree with the structure of this bill. We must stand up for individual privacy. What we have in this bill is a wolf in sheep's clothing, and if I were in Congress, I would have voted against it like other progressives such as Alan Grayson and Judy Chu."
The provisions of the Patriot Act which are set to expire in June should not be extended. We don't know for sure if they will. The USA Freedom Act ultimately died in the Senate when the Democrats who were in the majority at the time added a few safeguards and then couldn't overcome a filibuster. (Yes, the GOP ultimately filibustered the bill for being too weak ...) The Republicans are now in charge and Tom Cotton is working overtime to give the NSA every last item on their wishlist. Perhaps we'll get lucky and gridlock will work in favor of freedom once again. But I wouldn't count on it.
There are simply not enough principled, progressive civil libertarians in congress to stop these abuses. We must elect more of them. Please give what you can to stalwart civil libertarians like Donna Edwards and Alex Law.