Senate Judiciary Committee Rejects JUSTICE Act, Adopts Weaker Legislation

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) is usually considered solid on civil liberties issues, but nobody has been solid on the PATRIOT Act--with the exception of Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI), the only senator to vote against it when it first came up in 2001.

Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 11-8 to accept Leahy's USA PATRIOT Act Sunset Extension Act of 2009, rejecting Feingold's JUSTICE Act and leaving most of the PATRIOT Act's controversial provisions in place.

But the bill does make some modest changes, as the ACLU reports:

[T]here were two amendments included in the final bill - both offered by Senator Feingold - that are victories for privacy: The Department of Justice would be ordered to discard any illegally obtained information received in response to an NSL and the government must notify suspects of "sneak and peek" searches within seven days instead of the thirty days currently outlined in the statute. "Sneak and peek" searches allow the government to search a home without notifying the resident immediately.

That said, it's clear that the Democratic Senate isn't much more committed to dealing with issues of government surveillance than the Republican Senate was. It's incrementally better--five Republicans actually voted against the bill because they felt that it gave too much deference to the Fourth Amendment--but this vote demonstrates, as the inevitable passage of Leahy's bill will demonstrate, that neither major party takes our civil liberties as seriously as it should.

Related: More on Feingold's JUSTICE Act