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Democrats renege on PATRIOT Act promise
During his campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama, touting his background as a professor who taught constitutional law, often waxed eloquent about his commitment to civil liberties and to correcting the PATRIOT Act's threats to basic constitutional protections.
It was part of his stump speech on the campaign trail. And in one of the presidential debates he said, "I like to think that had I been in the Senate [in 2001], I would have [voted] against the Patriot Act."
And so, it might have been expected that when the Democratic-controlled Senate judiciary committee began consideration last week of whether or not to renew some of the more controversial provisions of the PATRIOT Act, they would have made an effort to fulfill the president's campaign promise and that the White House would have weighed in, in favor of reform.
Three sections of the act (the so-called "library provision", the use of roving wiretaps, and the "lone wolf" provision) are due to expire, at the end of the year, and this, therefore, was the time to either let them expire or, as The New York Times advocated, "add missing civil liberties and privacy protections, address known abuses and trim excesses".