In another thread discussing the current Howard Dean bashing by leading Democratic Party officials, it was announced that Feinstein will be on CNN's Late Edition tomorrow morning. So I dashed off to her site to express my support for Howard Dean, and to urge her to avoid bash Howard Dean agenda when bated on this topic tomorrow. She's one of my Senators who I've had to take issue with her on a number of concerns. I won't list those here, but when i went to her site, i saw this note (below) posted and realized that she's probably been invited to promulgate the benefits of Patriot Act, which she supports. Given yesterday's outrageous House judiciary committee proceedings - which i believe will be talked about too, (even though that was a House committee not a Senate committee hearing).
So I ended writing two letters to her this afternoon. One on the Dean Bashing and one on the Patriot Act. I didn't the save the copies before hitting send, so I can't reproduce those here, but essentially on the Patriot Act i strongly advocated for fairly balanced, open and very public Townhall meetings (fairly represented from all parties concerned, pro and con etc)across the state - so that she can hear very directly from her constituency on this matter and VOTE ACCORDING TO OUR view on this, not the administrations.
Anyway, I advocate that everyone should contact their Senators and Representatives and advocate for publically held townhall meetings with ACLU reps and Justice Dept spokespeople, and let the people decide. (i believe in the end, the people will decide that the so called Patriot Act is antithetical to our democracy and our Constitution).
I also advocate for others to contact Dianne Feinstein and let her know how you fee - especially Californians. I also mentioned in my letter that I signed on to Feingold's petition. The implication is that she should have a long chat with him.
Here's her note on the Patriot Act:
http://www.congress.org/congressorg/webreturn/?url=http://feinstein.senate.gov“As part of my effort to oversee the implementation of the USA-Patriot Act, I asked the ACLU, in a letter dated March 25, 2005, to provide an update of their October 2003 statement that they did not know of any abuses of the USA-Patriot Act.
On April 4, 2005, the ACLU published a reply to my letter, in which they listed what they described as ‘abuses and misuses’ of the Act. I carefully reviewed each of the examples provided in the letter. I also reviewed information provided to me by the Department of Justice about each of the examples. And while I understand the concerns raised by the ACLU, it does not appear that these charges rose to the level of ‘abuse’ of the Patriot Act.
That said, I believe that we can, and should, make some changes to the Patriot Act to ensure it is less likely to be abused in the future.
While I support reauthorization of the 16 provisions of the Patriot Act scheduled to expire at the end of the year, I want to make clear that I do not support the Intelligence Committee’s revised Patriot Act because of two provisions that could be open to serious abuse - the overly broad administrative subpoena and a change to FISA rules that would allow the FBI to conduct investigations using intelligence authorities solely to prosecute criminals.
I offered an amendment on both of these: to limit the use of administrative subpoenas to emergency cases with the approval of a Department of Justice official and to preserve the current FISA language that requires that investigations have as a “significant purpose” the collection of intelligence.
In my view, these are not minor but major amendments that address critical problems in the legislation. I intend to continue this effort in the Judiciary Committee and on the Senate Floor if necessary.”
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