Patriot Amendment Pros And Cons

The vote in the Senate was not as indicative of what the House numbers would suggest for Democrats. In fact, the bill was approved by the Senate at 98-1 with only one senator abstaining from the vote (Adachi 1 2006). That senator was Mary Landrieu, a Democratic senator from Louisiana who was currently serving in her first term. The lone senator who voted against the Patriot Act and in fact shared the many concerns that present day Americans have over the Patriot Act was Russ Feingold, a Democratic senator from Wisconsin, ironically the polar opposite of his fellow statesman Sen. Sensenbrenner, the same man who put the Patriot Act into writing. Feingold, though is not primarily known for being the lone person to vote against the Patriot Act.

Still, Democratic senators such as Joe Biden, who would become a familiar face in 2008, and even Hillary Clinton, the then Democratic senator from New York, supported the bill. The bill was approved by George Bush and signed into effect October 26, 2001. One of the most controversial pieces of legislation in American history was now going to be used by the government in its approach to handle terrorism. The bill also was reauthorized in 2006 at 89-10 with some past senators such as Robert Byrd voting against the bill that they had originally voted for in 2001 (Adachi 1 2006). While this paper will later explain the many and often repeated criticisms that the Patriot Act entails, it is very important to outline what the Patriot Act allows and what it brought into law. For starters, the original bill was a lengthy 320 pages and changed 15 federal laws so there was a massive overhaul in how security would function in what many considered to be a new nation. Essentially, the Patriot Act does an assortment of things. Though it may come off as paranoid to the people that say the government is watching you, this is true. The

While this paper is an objective one that will not take sides on the issue of the Patriot Act, it will provide a look at the criticisms due to initially writing on why it was originally passed in the first place. The main concern that people have about the Patriot Act stems from the belief that it strips away at fundamental civil liberties. Many people feel that the Patriot Act compromises a person’s right to privacy which has been supported through precedent in Supreme Court cases, despite it not being explicitly stated in the Constitution (Grabianowski 2007 1). Arguably, this has been the constant focal point people have against the Patriot Act as not everyone wants to sacrifice their right to privacy, even if it is for safety reasons that are meant to help all people. Still, this has been a valid point of contention among the public, especially after the Snowden NSA leak. There is also the civil liberty that citizens are free from unreasonable searches and seizures. This civil liberty is a point of contention for many pundits as they believe the Patriot Act compromise it. Other civil liberties that the Patriot Act is argued to violate include detaining witnesses and terrorist suspects without granting them access to lawyers, or even hearings or any formal charges (Grabianowski 2007 1). These are seen as going against the Fifth and Sixth Amendments which cover the rights