http://www.ocregister.com/ocr/2005/07/29/sections/commentary/commentary/article_614627.php Friday, July 29, 2005
A real patriot
Rep. Rohrabacher's vote defies party leadership
In a commendable move that has brought him a certain amount of grief from the Republican leadership and conservative commentators, Huntington Beach Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher was one of only nine Republicans to oppose making the Patriot Act a permanent part of American law in House voting last Thursday.
The conservative Mr. Rohrabacher, on the other hand, has been criticized from the right. He deserves credit for resisting this permanent increase in government power - which should be, one would think, the default position for genuine conservatives.
Critics of Mr. Rohrabacher (who supported the original Patriot Act in 2001) latched onto a sentence in his floor speech opposing making the increases in federal power permanent: "We should not be required to live in peacetime under the extraordinary laws that were passed during times of war and crisis. Emergency powers of investigation should not become the standard once the crisis has passed."
Mr. Rohrabacher, however, believes the United States will eventually win this war and should then revert to peacetime constitutionalism. "I was fully prepared to vote to extend the Patriot Act, with a provision extending the sections that were scheduled to expire this year for four more years, at which time they would sunset unless Congress renewed them," he told us.
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