Where Were They When It Counted?:
In the run-up to Bush's signing of the Patriot Act on October 25, the editorial columns of the major papers offered only nugatory comment about the dangers of the bill. While not as bad as the silence of the press over the internment of Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor, the tepid reaction of the media had disastrous consequences.
It would have taken only a few fierce columns or editorials, such as were profuse after November 13, to have given frightened politicians cover to join the only bold soul in the Senate, Russell Feingold of Wisconsin. ...But then, when the rubber met the road and Ashcroft sent up the Patriot bill, which vindicated every dire prediction of the spring, all fell silent except Feingold, who made a magnificent speech in the Senate the day the bill was signed, citing assaults on liberty going back to the Alien and Sedition Acts of John Adams, the suspension of habeas corpus sanctioned by the Supreme Court during the Civil War, the internments of World War II (along with 110,000 Japanese-Americans there were 11,000 German-Americans and 3,000 Italian-Americans put behind barbed wire), the McCarthyite blacklists of the 1950s and the spying on antiwar protesters in the 1960s. Under the terms of the bill, Feingold warned, the Fourth Amendment as it applies to electronic communications would be significantly curtailed. He flayed the measure as an assault on “the basic rights that make us who we are.” It represented “a truly breathtaking expansion of police power.”
Feingold was trying to win time for challenges in Congress to specific provisions in Ashcroft's bill. Those were the days in which sustained uproar from Safire or Lewis or kindred commentators would have made a difference. Feingold's was the sole vote against the bill in the Senate. Just like Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening in their lonely opposition to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964, Feingold will receive his due and be hailed as a hero by the same people who held their tongue in the crucial hours when a vigilant press could have helped save the day. Instead, as Murray Kempton used to say of editorial writers, they waited till after the battle to come down from the hills to shoot the wounded.
For this reason alone, Feingold should receive fealty from the liberals, if and when he decides to run for President in 2008.
Technorati Tags: Feingold, Patriot_Act
amen.
some people tend to forget his lone vote against the PATRIOT act, and instead, amazingly, still harp on his vote for ashcroft as ag.
but where were those senators who voted against ashcroft when it counted? to quote ralph neas, they "voted against the Constitution."
Yes, and his vote for confirmation of John Roberts sort of sticks in my craw, but both votes can be explained, kind of. Mr. Feingold attempts to explain his Roberts vote in the Salon interview.
I think his votes to confirm Ashcroft and Roberts were reasonable--Feingold recognizes he's in the minority party and that the majority have the Executive.
He's got my vote in '08--I think he's the only palatable choice in the current cast of DLC-ers.