The point about having something shoved down ones throat is that one gags on it. RICO passed, if I recall, without so much as a gulp. My point was that RICO abridged the freedoms of Americans more than the Patriot Act yet umm went down smoothly. The Patriot Act got overwhelming support from Congress. Neither was shoved down our throats. A good example of a piece of presidential/congressional throat gagging would be the stimulus bill which is being forced down our throats as fast as it can with everyone and I mean EVERYONE(msm included) choking on it. And on immigration, the census, and the fairness doctrine, well we barfed the 1st and the 3rd up already, and will do so again on the census issue.
I agree with much of what you say in this post (without the various insults/insinuations of the last post, which really weren’t necessary, read my post history from that time period).
I agree that despite a full-court media press, this and the bailout last year are very unpopular (with very good reason, particularly this one) and are going to become law anyway. This is the looting of the US treasury happening before our eyes.
It is remarkable that amnesty did NOT pass - I think opposition to it was a large majority % of the voting population, yet they nearly pulled it off. No doubt it will become law at some point soon.
The public mood after 9/11/01 was understandably scared/very insistent that the government DO something. They could have passed a patriot act which changed the national mascot to mickey mouse and it still would have had decent public support, as long as it promised to make people safe. Fedgov had a rather large law just waiting for a major event to push it through without debate, and they got it. To me, this is bad legislative process - in effect, as far as I know, the bill was not open to amendments, meaning congress had very little input at all. Of course they voted unanimously - I assume to some degree they felt threatened as well, many of them aren’t the sharpest pencils in the box anyway, and their constituents would have been livid if they balked. This doesn’t for a second mean most of them had clue 2 about what was in the bill.
An extra month of debate would not have hurt anyone (I have no doubt bush/cheney were going to do what needed doing, and I support this), yet would have possibly given people time to consider if they wanted hillary clinton (or now, obama) with this law in their hands, or with some elements of it. I am fairly certain I actually said this (re clinton) on FR at the time. I don’t feel it makes me a terrorist sympathizer or whatever you called me to point this out. I do feel it is stupid to not consider how the political opposition could use a law you support your side having.
It was a long time ago, but my memory is saying that one thing about what I knew about the law when it was being passed was that it seemed more oriented on domestic terrorism (meaning terrorism by native-born americans) rather than foreign organizations. I wondered if the law had originally been written with the OKC bombing or other similar stuff in mind, rather than bin laden/wtc1994 etc. This reinforced my belief that this was an off-the-shelf law that had been around a while.
I hope I have explained my point. When the public is genuinely scared and angry and physically threatened, you can pass anything you want in the name of security (or whatever watchword is needed. That doesn’t mean it is good to simply pass a bill with no amendment or debate or even discussion.