Sen. Dick Durbin Crafting A Bill To Fix Patriot Act Abuses

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety,

 deserve neither liberty nor safety" - Ben Franklin

THE NEWS:

For the last decade the Patriot Act has been renewed again and again, despite the bills controversy and known abuses.  On February 14th, the House, acting as expected, renewed the bill until December 2011.

A day later the Senate amended the bill to renew it for only three months, thanks to long-term opponents like Majority Whip Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL).  On February 17th, the House then approved the Senate's short-term extension until May 27th.

[For the curious:  There is a majority (party in the majority of the legislative body) and minority whip (party in the minority of the legislative body).  The House and Senate both has them.  Their responsibility is to make sure that their respective party votes in line with the party's stance on an issue.

Sen. Durbin says this short extension gives the opposition time to deliberate, fix and hopefully pass a revised version of the bill that will close the loopholes that allow intelligence agencies to spy on the American people.  Proponents of the bill say that these short extensions create uncertainty for U.S. intelligence organizations and puts America at risk for attacks.

So lets look at the bill a little more in depth to understand the arguments: (If you do not feel like reading, skip to the end to contact your representatives)

THE CONTEXT:

The Patriot Act was passed shortly after the September 11th attacks in 2001.  The passage of this bill was prompted when the government realized that there was a major breakdown in the way our intelligence community worked.

Prior to 9/11 the CIA (Foreign Intelligence), FBI (Domestic Intelligence), and the National Security Council (NSC) (The President's forum for considering foreign and domestic security issues) operated separately- meaning that each organization did not share information with one another. 

This was done for a few reasons: to protect sensitive data from leaking (gossip), to safeguard individuals from being kidnapped and tortured for their knowledge (the less you know, the more useless you are to enemies), and thirdly, and most oddly, because the agencies and their departments were competing with one another to break a case first.  Really, it was just a type of pissing contest, if you will.  

The 9/11 Commission found that each intelligence organization had a piece of the puzzle to prevent the attacks, but since their data could not be collaborated, the whole picture was never put together to prevent the largest attack on American soil.

Well, like most legislation- the intent of the bill was good, until the nationalist in Congress added their clauses. 

The Good: 

• The Patriot Act eased restrictions for the various intelligence agencies to access each other's databases.
• It provided easier methods to search or survey telephone, email, financial, and/or medical records of known or suspected terrorists given that a warrant was issued by a judge upon his/her review of sufficient evidence (probable cause). (I apologize to any English majors for the use of passive voice) This process traditionally took multiple reviews and a 48-hour time delay to check all evidence.
• It also expanded the Secretary of Treasury's power to regulate financial transactions.  This is important for identifying funders of terrorist cells and tracking large or suspicious transactions that could indicate the purchasing of weapons to be used against the U.S.

The Bad:

• Included in the bill was a provision that changed the definition of terrorism.  The new definition was expanded to include domestic terrorism, without any further elaboration.  The original meaning of this was probably targeted at A.L.F., E.L.F., K.K.K., the Army of God, the Jewish Defense League, etc.  With no clarification on or limit to what domestic terrorism includes, this clause has been abused to include every citizen.  Therefore, the Patriot Act has been used to monitor and survey every citizen with little or no probable cause.  This strips every citizen, guilty or not of lawful guarantees laid out in the Bill of Rights.
• Using the powers of the Patriot Act to monitor all of the citizenry comes into conflict with the fourth amendment, which provides protection from unreasonable searches and seizures:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

• President Bush also abused the bill by altering the traditional procedure for obtaining warrants.  He created special courts using presidential prerogative (loosely interpreting the law, or acting with discretion in the name of the public good).  This special court had a panel of judges, who could be called at any hour of the day to issue an instantaneous warrant.  Even worse, Bush used executive orders (orders given only to the executive staff) allowing NSC to conduct wiretaps and searches without first obtaining a warrant.
• The bill also expanded law enforcements ability to detain or deport immigrants suspected of terrorism.  This clause violates the Non-Detention Act- an act that was passed to prevent events like the internment of the Japanese-Americans during WWII from happening again.

In Conclusion:

The spirit of the Patriot Act was to enable our intelligence community to better communicate with its many branches to target foreign terrorists, or suspected terrorists residing in the United States.  Instead, the power of the bill has been exploited by many entities to circumvent the judicial system and the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens.  The bill was not supposed to make it easier for the government to find petty thieves, drug dealers, tax evaders, or conduct random roving surveillance sweeps to find someone doing something wrong. Protecting our national security has come at the cost of undermining the Constitution.

Contact you Senators and Congressman/woman telling them to revise the Patriot Act.

You can use this simple prompt:

Dear ______

In the coming months I hope you will work with and support the changes Sen. Dick Durbin is making to the USA PATRIOT ACT.  The bill does have some worthy aspects like helping our intelligence community operate more efficiently, as well using surveillance techniques against foreign terrorist entities and known foreign terrorist living within the United States.  

Unfortunately, there are portions of the bill that gives unprecedented power to law enforcement agencies and the executive branch.  These powers have been used against the citizenry undermining their rights laid out in the Fourth Amendment, Non-Detention Act, and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Please support new provisions to the Patriot Act to make it constitutional.

Sincerely, _______

Find Your Senators

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House Votes No On Funding For Extra GE Motor

Despite Speaker John Boehner's protest, the House voted no on extending funding for the manufacturing of an extra motor for the Joint Strike Fighter Jet, which cost the taxpayer $28 million a month, for the rest of this year.

GE Aviation has been contracted for over a decade to build a spare motor for each jet built.  The production of the motor sustains more than 1,000 employees in Ohio, John Boehner's state, and has is the epitome of pork barrel spending.  A bit ironic, considering Boehner's strong rhetoric against wasteful spending.

The production of this motor has long been scorned by the Pentagon, fiscal conservatives, watch-dog groups, anti-pork voters and many Democrats, but yet year after year it gets funding.  Recently; however, the mainstream news has actually talked about this program.  This just shows how the American public can change politics when we have the knowledge and protest to our elected representatives.

Again, funding has only been suspended for the rest of 2011.  Ohio representatives and fans of the military-industrial complex are fighting to have it refunded for 2012.

Contact your representatives and tell them to cut this program and programs like this, instead of funding for education.

Find Your Senators

Find Your Congressmen/Women

Both sites have search bars to find and contract your representatives located on the top part of their homepages.

(See the previous post where I talk about this motor being one of the examples of how to cut the budget.)

Obama to Make Budget Cuts, GOP Eyes Up Education

Obama's 2012 Budget was proposed this week.  Nothing is set in stone yet, as Democrats and Republicans will fight one another over the next few weeks to see what gets funding and what gets cut.

The Process:
The President submits a detailed budget request to Congress outlining how much funding programs and agencies will need for the following year.  Obama is currently in this stage with Congress.  Included in the request is a detailed argument on why a agency needs more funding, or why it is getting less to try to persuade Congress to approve the proposal.  The House's and Senate's Committee on the Budget each come up with their own resolution on the budget, which much be done by early April.  The bill is then submitted to the respective floor for debate and passage.

Once each chamber passes their own budget resolution it must be reconciled between both chambers, meaning both budget resolutions must match each other word for word.  This process is done with representatives from the Senate and the House- where some changes are usually made to both.  Once both resolutions have been reconciled, the representatives release a conference report stating the finalized version of the budget.  Both the House and Senate must vote on that version for it to become binding.  Once approved, money is then appropriated, or set aside, for the each agency that is supposed to receive funding.

The News:
One thing the President has proposed is cutting Pell Grants.  These grants provide a payment of $5,550 to lower income individuals to help aid in the cost of college tuition.  Pell Grants are the main source of aid for lower and middle-class families sending their kids to college with over 9 million students using them a year.

Currently a student is eligible for two of these grants a year.  One during the traditional school year and another if a student takes summer classes.  Obama wants to cut payment for the summer term Pell Grants citing that students who use these summer grants do not graduate any faster.  This is expected to save $8 billion next year and $60 billion over 10 years.  In addition, Obama proposes cutting graduate level loan subsidization for a total of $2 billion savings next year and $29 billion over the decade.

The Interpretation and Opinion:
The biggest blow seems to come to the graduate students.  Most are working individuals who decided to go back to school because they want to become more productive at their jobs.  The more productive a worker is, the more productive society becomes.  This policy will deter individuals considering pursuing a higher degree.  This is a major setback for stimulating education and also reduces the human capital value of the United States making it even harder to compete with foreign nations.

Only time will tell what the effects of cutting summer Pell Grants will have, but it seems that if a student is enrolled in a summer class, then the grant has done its job to foster education.  The job market in this nation is extremely competitive, so I'm not sure that Obama taking aim at higher education is the right place to start slashing the budget.

In addition the President has proposed to cut services that help assist the working poor and programs that help families heat their homes.

Still, even with all these cuts to the lower and middle-class programs the GOP is still not happy.  They think that there needs to be more cuts to "help ease the deficit".  This seems a little ironic after the Republicans blackmailed Obama by withholding unemployment compensation extensions until he passed tax cuts extensions for the rich.  These tax cut extensions instantly added $858 billion to the national deficit, which by the way is more than the cost of the stimulus package.

So will the cut happy, fiscal hawk GOP want to slash away at larger, more burdensome strains on the budget like business subsidies or defense spending?  NO.  They think even more needs to be slashed from education and college financial aid.

How about slashing some military contracts?  For example, GE Aviation is lobbying Congress not to cut their engine deal for the Joint Strike Fighter Jet.  This deal contracts GE to build an extra engine for each Joint Strike Fighter Jet.  The real killer is that the Pentagon says they don't need or want the motor.  So why would would the government continue to pay $250,000 a motor?  The manufacturing of this motor has supplied 1,000 jobs in Ohio for the last 15 years.

Maybe we should ask Speaker Boehner why he is maintaining such a socialist stimulus package to his state.  Funny how something is socialism only when you don't benefit from it.  The free market and the Pentagon has decided. So Obama and Congressional Democrats and Republicans, I think we have a line in the budget to slash.

Why is it that only the middle-class and poor programs have to make sacrifices.  Shouldn't the Speaker and his state also bear some of these growing pains?

Obtaining the American Dream and having a chance to compete in our capitalistic system starts with having an education. Yet the government wants to put up more hurdles to gain a degree for the lower and middle classes while fighting tooth an nail to make sure the rich get tax cuts and big businesses get subsidies.

All this talk of budget cuts is a joke anyway.  Even under this new budget the national debt is expected to increase from $14 trillion to $21 trillion by 2016 because no one has the backbone to cut anything real.  Cutting education is just a costly lip service that cripples the future of this nation.

Voting against extending the $858 billion deficit causing tax cuts for the rich would have been much more effective at reducing the national debt than cutting $60 billion over a decade that goes fostering education.  (Not to mention what it did to the U.S. loan rating)  The thing is, the $60 billion it costs to to send 90 million productive, college educated, tax paying, consumers to school pays for itself.  This number doesn't even include how many graduate students will be dissuaded from school.

Now here is some dirty math, that is doesn't figure out all the interest rates, or when each student graduates but it gives a good ballpark number:

If you take the average salary ($42,000) in the United States and figure out the progressive income tax rate for that bracket you get $5,570 payed to the government.  If you then multiply that by 90 million educated kids that will loose the Pell Grant incentive over the next decade, the government will collect an average annual revenue of $501 billion in taxes.  That means even with interests over the time it takes for these kids to graduate and work their way up, the government will make more back on their investment than they put in, not the mention the businesses and inventions some of these 90 million people will add to America's technological knowledge.  Thats good business.  Building motors we don't need is not.

Education is a human capital investment.  Tax cuts for the rich, quite simply make the rich richer.

Mission Statement

Please bear with this first post.  If anything skip the biography and go to the bold text.

First, I'll start with a little about me.  My name is Jeff Bastian.  I am a recent graduate from the University of Pittsburgh with a BA in political science and a minor in economics.  My specialized areas include extensive study and research involving such topics as the U.S Congress, Latin American politics, and political theory (ancient to modern).  Since a child I have always been interested in history and politics, but when I graduated high school I took an unexpected turn in becoming an auto mechanic.  My personal hobby, teenage angst, and disillusionment combined at 18 to buck my own aspirations and passions to go to college.  It was easier to give up on social justice then fight for it; however, there is nothing like turning wrenches, replacing transmissions, and dealing with a hostile employer to put things into perspective.

A quick look around the garage revealed 40 year olds who were miserable, had outrageous healthcare premiums, no vacation time, sick days, or personal days.  Also, a surprising attribute of the job was that the employees and management quite frequently engaged in Machiavellian politics.  There were many casualties.  Realizing that this was not the life I wanted for myself I started taking classes before and after work at a community college.

I realized that this sad state of affairs around me was a microcosm for the middle class workingman.  This environment re-sparked my passion of politics and it could no longer be ignored.  By then my teenage angst  had mellowed a bit and I realized being proactive is more conducive to success then being reactive.  I decided to major in political science for the usual reasons: fight injustices, help reform Washington, stop power abuses and special interests- all that good idealistic stuff.  About a year into studying and working, I too became a victim of the garage's vicious "office" politics.  We will just say, "Et tu, Brute?"  With no real direction, I plunged into my education.

That is when I found myself at Pitt.  Through my studies, those idealistic aspirations were tarnished by realizing that the system is so corrupt, convoluted, powerful, and self defeating that nothing could be changed.  I questioned if there was any hope to save this country, and see it aspire to its full potential.

I guess such pessimism was to be expected when all you do study the bureaucracy, the wrong, and the evil, but every once in a while you have to step back and take a breath.  As humans it is easy to fall into demanding quick results.  We have to remember- never give up on the good fight.  There are many battles that are lost, but through persistence the war is eventually won.  For future reference, I'll try to avoid the cliches, but they do have their time and place.  Look at how long universal suffrage, civil rights, the labor movement, social security, etc took to come to fruition in this country.

These previous achievement took so long because people did not have easy ways to stay informed, organize, or express their views and concerns to their representatives.  When these events took place, politicians had a even tighter grip on power than they do now, but does that mean we are still doomed to decades to see results?  With the Internet, there is no longer time for excuses.  It is the publics' second most powerful weapon, the only problem is action.

This brings me to the point of this blog.

I understand that to most- politics are boring.  People are busy trying to make ends meet and in their free time are either trying to relax or squeeze some type of a social life into their schedule.  The last thing anyone wants to do is research what our politicians are doing, analyze if it's good policy, investigate if they are telling the truth, all the while trying to understand the operation and intricacies of policymaking.

So, if the Internet is the second most powerful, what is the first?

Knowledge.

I am still greatly offended by the government overstepping its bounds, not stepping in when it should and being controlled by interests other than our own.  The problem is that not enough people know what is going on in our politics.  That is why I want to create a source for people to stay up to date.

-I want to create a blog that is easily accessible for people, no matter how interested or not one may be in government and politics.  These policies affect everyone, being vigilant is the only way to make sure everyone is playing by the same rules of the game.

-I will present the information in a simple manner that outlines what is happening, how it will happen and how the policy will affect the public.

-I will present it with brevity.  No one likes reading a four page article about one topic, when there are multiple topics that arise each day.  That takes away valuable time from the other demands in our life.  I may provide a more in depth analysis of a topic if it is needed for context or is important to a larger understanding; however, it will still be prefaced with the shorter outline of the who, what, when, where, why and how.

-I will stick to policy that really matters.  Our major news sources tend to stick to one or two talking points in a news cycle that are not even really important.  E.G. Did you know the president quit smoking?

-I will try to explain terms and operations that may be unclear.  If any reader has any question about anything please contact me.  I will be more than happy to explain a topic or procedure.  Also, if anyone wants me to cover a certain issue more in depth please let me know.

If social networking sites have proved anything it is that people like brief statements explaining
what happened, or what someone is doing.  The interesting thing is how effective these brief statements are in spreading the news throughout a social circle.  Think of how quickly you learn about a friend's party, or unfortunately a death of a close one via your social network.  It is a very effective means to achieve the end result of knowledge.

I also hope to create a texting service that sends out policy updates.  Text messaging is another effective means we receive information throughout our days.  In addition, I will create a mobile version of this blog for those who have data plans to read more about my articles than just the update.

The one thing I can't make extremely brief is the correspondence of your feelings to your representatives.  This is the most important aspect of this venture I propose.  Knowledge needs to be put into use.  Without putting pressure on your representatives, we will still be ignored.  Remember all this technology is useless if we do not use it properly.

Not to fret though because with this technology it is easier now than ever to contact your members of Congress. They all have email contact and phone numbers.  I will provide information making it easy to find out who your Congressman or Congresswomen and Senators are, as well with their contact information.   If there is one thing we all know about politicians, it is that they only care about getting reelected.  All the Political Action Committee (PAC), 527's, and special interests money means nothing if politicians are bombarded by their constituents.

The American people send their message once every two years about their distaste of certain policies, but it is in the interim that this undesirable legislation is written.  Paying attention a few weeks before election day does not give us the full story of what a politician has been up to the rest of the year.  Their campaigns know that people tune in only during the election, and their public relations and campaign managers are ready to counter fact with lies, convoluted messages, attack ads, or fact bending.  Taking issue with a policy after it has been passed is ineffective.  If we spend a few moments each week or month stopping the legislation before it wreaks havoc, think about how much better off we all will be.  We can be angry, but once it's passed it is next to impossible to repeal it.

You see, the most amazing thing about our government is that we are still in charge. We always have been.  Representative government ultimately rests in the peoples' hands, it's such a fundamental notion that we often forget we chart our own course.  The state of affairs we see right now is because we have failed our own calling.  We the people have become too complacent and apathetic in our own government and we have lost control as a result.  We may think we can't win, we may think it's hopeless, but in reality the condition of the government is no one's fault but our own.  It is why every nation in 1776 laughed and watched expectantly for the "American Experiment" to fail.  Some still do expect to see us fail.  Representative government is hard.  It demands a level of social responsibility that human's innately shirk away from, but we all are worse off when we neglect our duties.

I am here to make our duties easier, so all I ask is that you join me.