Ron Paul: Trust Us, We're the Government

[Robbien]

Attorney General John Ashcroft has embarked on a bizarre promotional tour to counter growing public opposition to the Patriot Act. The administration clearly is worried by recent votes in Congress to limit the scope of the Act, votes that reflect the willingness of even GOP loyalists to buck the president on the issue. So Mr. Ashcroft is visiting several cities to give a stump speech that essentially says this: Trust us- we’re the government, and we say the Patriot Act does not threaten civil liberties.

But the attorney general misses the point. Government assurances are not good enough in a free society. The overwhelming burden must always be placed on government to justify any new encroachment on our liberty. Now that the emotions of September 11th have cooled, the American people are less willing to blindly accept terrorism as an excuse for expanding federal surveillance powers.

Furthermore, Mr. Ashcroft is an administrator, not a legislator. It is not his job to write laws or say what the law should be. His job is to execute the laws passed by Congress. It is not his place to chide Congress or the American people for not supporting his viewpoint. He certainly should not be spending taxpayer money to lobby for his political positions.

http://www.house.gov/paul/tst/tst2003/tst082503.htm

the interesting part of this is that Ashcroft opposed government surveillance back when the Dems proposed it, see closing paragraphs

[indepat]

1. I hear what Congressman Paul says, but surely Ashcroft wrote the Patriot

Act, mostly long before 9-11, with the help of his minions who were told what to write. That's my take. Am I wrong?

[w4rma]

2. The USA PATRIOT Act Was Planned Before 9/11

…
Whether the Administration could have anticipated 9/11 or not, the proponents of the USAPA were waiting to go long before that day. Similar antiterrorism legislation was enacted in the 1996 Antiterrorism Act, which however did little to prevent the events of 9/11, and many provisions had either been declared unconstitutional or were about to be repealed when 9/11 occurred.

James X. Dempsey and David Cole state in their book, "Terrorism & the Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties in the Name of National Security," that the most troubling provisions of the pre-USAPA anti-terrorism laws, enacted in 1996 and expanded now by the USAPA, "were developed long before the bombings that triggered their final enactment."

Dempsey is the former assistant counsel to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights and Deputy Director at the Center for Democracy & Technology, and Cole is professor of law at Georgetown University and an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Looking back at the 1996 Antiterrorism Act, Dempsey and Cole declare that "the much-touted gains in law enforcement powers" under that Act, "produced no visible concrete results in the fight against terrorism." They add that the principles espoused in the Act "were shown in case after case to be both unconstitutional and ineffective in the fight against terrorism." And importantly, the authors comment that the United States government has not shown that the expanded powers it has asserted in the USAPA are necessary to fight terrorism.

Dempsey and Cole trace the origins of the national security trend back to the "intolerant approaches of the 1950s," when association with Communist or anarchist groups was made a ground for exclusion and deportation. Congress removed the guilt by association law in 1990, but it was revived only six years later by law enforcement proponents in the 1996 Antiterrorism Act, immediately following the Oklahoma City Bombing.

More specifically, however, Dempsey and Cole show that it was the Reagan Administration which initially proposed some of the most troubling provisions which eventually became part of the USAPA. When Reagan proposed these provisions, Congress rejected them on constitutional grounds. The first Bush Administration then made similar proposals, which were again rejected by lawmakers. Congress twice refused to enact the secret evidence provisions proposed by Bush I. (Indeed, just prior to 9/11, Congress was about to pass a law repealing the secret evidence provisions of the 1996 Antiterrorism Act.)
…
http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/05.21B.jvb.usapa.911.htm

[indepat]

3. Thanks for the input and link: the Patriot Act was more about quelling

dissent/stifling the voices of nonbelievers, than combating terrorism, in my opinion.