“A minority of senators want to gamble with American lives and ‘fix’ national security laws, which they can’t show are broken. They seek to eliminate or weaken anti-terrorism measures which take into account that the Cold War and its slow-moving, analog world of landlines and stationary targets is gone. The threat we face today is a completely new paradigm of global terrorist networks operating in a high-velocity digital age using the Web and fiber-optic technology.
“After four-and-a-half years without another terrorist attack, these senators think we’re safe enough to cave in to the same civil liberties lobby that supported that deadly Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) “wall” [which, before the Patriot Act, prevented information-sharing between law enforcement and intelligence agencies that might have thwarted the 9/11 attacks] in the first place. What if they…are simply wrong?”
In a television ad produced by the Coalition for Security, Liberty and the Law, Ms. Burlingame asks a further question: “What will [those senators] say to their constituents if another attack occurs that might have been prevented” had key provisions of the Patriot Act not been weakened or allowed to expire?
These are questions the President himself should pointedly pose during tonight’s address: Does anyone listening – in the House chambers and across this great country – want to bet, in the face of known threats and likely ones, that we can responsibly deny those charged with protecting us the tools they have successfully used since 2001?
Are the Patriot Act’s critics really willing to risk the lives of potentially many thousands of Americans on a gamble that we can once again safely accord terrorists more legal protections than we do drug-traffickers, racketeers and other criminals – an anamolous, not to say bizarre, situation corrected by the Patriot Act?
The truth of the matter is, as Debra Burlingame puts it so well: “Ask the American people what they want. They will say that they want the commander-in-chief to use all reasonable means to catch the people who are trying to rain terror on our cities.”
So tonight, Mr. Bush should – and I am confident, will – make clear that neither he nor the Congress have any duty higher than that of protecting the American people. Adopting the conference report that will extend or make permanent the Patriot Act’s “sunsetted” provisions, and preserve its full usefulness in combating terror at home, is consistent with that duty. Filibustering the conference report – to say nothing of the boast last month by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid that opponents had “killed the Patriot Act” – is not.