Posted on 06/12/2005 7:23:05 AM PDT by kingattax
WASHINGTON — The Republican House Judiciary Committee chairman walked off with the gavel Friday, leaving Democrats shouting into turned-off microphones at a raucous hearing on the Patriot Act.
The hearing, with the two sides accusing each other of being irresponsible and undemocratic, came as President Bush was urging Congress to renew the sections of the post-Sept. 11 counter-terrorism law set to expire in September.
Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), chairman of the panel, abruptly gaveled the meeting to an end and walked out, followed by other Republicans. Sensenbrenner said that much of the testimony, which veered into debate over the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was irrelevant.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) protested, raising his voice as his microphone went off, came back on, and went off again.
"We are not besmirching the honor of the United States; we are trying to uphold it," he said.
Democrats had asked for the hearing, the 11th the committee has held on the act since April, saying past hearings had been too slanted toward witnesses who supported the law. The four witnesses were from groups, including Amnesty International USA and the American Immigration Lawyers Assn., that had questioned the constitutionality of some aspects of the act, which allows law enforcement greater authority to investigate suspected terrorists.
Nadler said Sensenbrenner, an author of the Patriot Act, was "rather rude, cutting everybody off in midsentence with an attitude of total hostility."
Tempers flared when Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) accused Amnesty International of endangering the lives of Americans in uniform by calling the prison at Guantanamo Bay a "gulag." Sensenbrenner didn't allow the Amnesty representative, Chip Pitts, to respond until Nadler raised a "point of decency."
Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.)
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Hell, Congress is constitutionally required to renew the Army's funding every two years at least, but that doesn't seem to have hurt us any.
...wondering why the definitions of sedition and treason are so trivial nowadays.
Also looming large on Bush's radar is one hemisphere, free trade, freely travel anywhere from the Great White North to whatever that Horn is at the base of South America. And down the line, even more globalization. This would mean we'd have to have some kind of protection from terrorists with happy feet and suitcase bombs heading across our non-existent borders. That's the rationale, if one can call it that.
Way out of bounds or not, it is politically stupid.
Many Republicans are questioning the Patriot Act. They will not "crawl across broken glass" to vote for the party that makes it permanent.
Straighten up, citizen!
Statements like that are in themselves seditious.
One could, but it looks more like they will use it to keep us quiet.
more americans have their civil rights violations trampled at traffic stops, including being tasered, then the Patriot Act is resulting in. The Lodi arrests should tell us what is going on in our own country, and that is just the tip of the iceberg.
GWB could be exaggerating his demands to head off the weakening or killing of the Patriot Act that the left would like to achieve.
As if the DIMS would know anything about that!
It is precisely because of the Patriot Act that “grave threats to our national security” have not come to fruition.
Now there's a small requirement contained in the Constitution that I didn't anyone else besides myself was aware of.
"Bush is way out bounds in demanding that the Patriot Act be made permanent."
Right on the mark inquest. Making something like the Patriot Act permanent will never fly with alot of people. Just becuase I voted for him does not mean I will support aa half-assed idea like that.
You have to remember: Who put Japanese into Internment Camps? Republicans? NO-they were the despised party of Herbert Hoover, that evil, greedy Republican.
Oh Yeah.. it was Franklin Democrat Roosevelt.
Cry me a river. What actually was going was yet another off-topic and partisan (and baseless) attack on the administration and Sensenbrenner did the right thing by putting a stop to it.
How pathetic that Nadler tries to insert a lame echo of the infamous "have you no decency, sir" query from the McCarthy hearings.
Would you please tell us what part(s) of the Patriot Act you find objectionable?
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