About Time

Found buried half way down yesterday's TIME story:

Several liberal Senate Democrats such as Sen. Russ Reingold of Wisconsin and Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, along with Independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont, have proposed a bill known as the Justice Act, which would curb many of the sweeping powers of the Patriot Act. The bill would reauthorize the expiring Patriot Act provisions, but would add new limits: roving wiretaps could no longer target John Doe suspects and would require identification of the target. It would also leave in place the ability of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to compel document disclosure, but would limit that power to the records of people connected to terrorism or espionage. It would make numerous other changes, such as limiting use of National Security Letters — a power the FBI has misused in the past, according to the Inspector General of the Justice Department — to force document disclosure and lifting telecommunication companies' immunity from civil claims arising from the Bush Administration's warrantless wiretaps.

It is amazing that this has taken so long. The PATRIOT Act, and the handful of other similarly rationalized legal and extralegal precedents set over the course of the last nine years, are likely some of the most poisonous and potentially long-lasting remnants of the Bush administration's legacy. What's more amazing is the failure of even the progressives, both within the administration and within Congress, to get behind the reform.

Holder...laid out the new guidelines in a four-page memo specifying that state secrecy would only be invoked when genuine or significant harm to national defense or foreign relations is at stake.

In other words, the Obama administration is taking the bold step of upholding most of the more odious practices of the previous administration--but pinky-swearing that they'll only act upon them when it's super-duper important. I imagine this is just the kind of binding resolution the founding fathers had in mind when they thought to provide checks and balances between the branches.

And then more surprising:

One thing is conspicuously missing from Feingold's bill: The sponsorship of Sen. Patrick Leahy, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Leahy has proposed a different bill, which does not go as far as Feingold’s.

I like Patrick Leahy. I want him to be in the right. But on this particular issue, Feingold is the only Senator with any degree of established credibility. Here is the grand legislative opposition that raised up against the 2001 Patriot Act:

NAYs ---1 Feingold (D-WI)

(Source: US Senate)

Personally, I have hope for Bernie Sanders too. That makes two Senators who are in most cases politically palatable.

Given the still embryonic stage of what may very well eventually be called the JUSTICE Act, maybe it isn't quite fair to start criticizing the Obama administration for its lack of--or otherwise uselessly tepid--support. But here's a hint:

Assistant Attorney General David Kris, chief of the Department of Justice's National Security Division, said the Administration had not fully reviewed or taken a stance on either [the Feingold or the Leahy] bill. Justice officials say they're willing to discuss added protections for civil liberties and privacy, but only so long as they don't dilute the government's authority to exercise its powers.

A solid, well-intentioned point, Mr. Kris. Except that diluting the powers of the government is the entire fucking point. If only the administration were willing to offer such bullshit compromises to the real opposition, we might actually have a reasonably functional healthcare system.

So as things stand now, if reform is going to come at all, it's going to have to come slowly. In the meantime, here's an appetizer: