It's unimaginable how they would have reacted had President Bush put those reforms in place before 9/11.
Exactly.
Well, I know how I'd have reacted if Clinton had done it in 1998 or 1996 -- particularly in 1996, after he had, the previous year, basically accused Newt Gingrich of driving the Ryder truck to Oklahoma City and Rush of having lit the fuse. I'd have assumed that Clinton was attempting to reverse the outcome of the 1994 elections through his very most favoritest gimmick -- indicting, trying, and convicting his political detractors of some felony charge.
And that would have been a very real possibility. After all, Clintonoid political commentators had run up that "1992 was the rubber match and we won history; time to put Rush in jail!" stuff a couple of years before, in the middlebrow opinion magazines.
I'd have had the same problems with the Patriot Act that I do now (how do you catch terrorists when you afford them civic rights and insist that police and investigative agencies treat them like citizens? and if you make an exception for terrorists, how long before the exception widens to swallow all political opposition to the Executive?), but if they'd been authored by the worst man to be president since Lyndon Johnson, I would have been very, very deeply suspicious.