PATRIOT Act vote was shameful

In case you haven’t been able to keep up with the news this week (and given how hard that is to do with our corporately-run media, it would not be surprising), you might want to learn a little bit about the way in which the Republicans managed the vote on an amendment to the PATRIOT Act. There’s a particularly good piece by Joel Barkin up at CommonDreams.org that details what happened.

"Ironically, the Republicans had subverted the most basic underlying principle of a democracy - that the will of the majority as evidenced by a fairly taken vote should prevail - in order to protect the Bush Administration's abridgement of American civil liberties under section 215 of the Patriot Act."

The voting time expired, with the amendment passing (due to almost 30 Republicans supporting it), but the presiding Republican did not close the voting process, and other Republicans worked to put pressure on their colleagues until the vote was a tie -- at which point the amendment died. And what was the amendment they were so afraid of having passed? It would have prevented the government from secretly opening up citizens' reading records at libraries or accessing lists of books bought at your local Barnes & Noble.

The Bush administration is deliberating seeking to erode our civil liberties, and to promulgate the kind of fear that will keep us silent in the face of such efforts. Take a moment to surf over to the American Civil Liberties Union and let Bush know you're too patriotic to stand for this!