Congress Weighs Patriot Act Limits

Congressional Republicans signaled Wednesday they were unwilling to rubber-stamp the administration’s push to make permanent controversial sections of the Patriot Act.

The GOP lawmakers are considering at least some modifications on the authority of government agencies in charge of preventing future terrorist attacks.

Sixteen provisions of the Patriot Act, passed hastily in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks to expand the government’s investigative powers, are set to expire at the end of the year. The Bush administration has asked Congress to make them permanent.

However, two House committees and a key senator took steps Wednesday to extend the act’s most controversial provisions for only a temporary period or add judicial checks on some powers the act grants to investigatory agencies.

It remains to be seen whether the proposed limits will remain in the bill as it is debated in both chambers and different versions are reconciled.

But the fact that the Republican-led committees in the House, which generally follow the administration’s wishes, declined to make all the provisions permanent indicated that the White House was not likely to get a blank check from Congress.

In particular, the House Judiciary Committee put a 10-year expiration date on the provision granting federal authorities the right to subpoena records from businesses, hospitals and libraries, as well as a provision allowing the government to continue to wiretap phones when suspects switch numbers.

The House Intelligence Committee approved making those provisions permanent, but only after adding measures to require additional judicial oversight of the subpoenas and search requests.

Both House committees declined to include a measure proposed this year by the Senate Intelligence Committee that would grant the investigators the right to use “administrative subpoenas” -- effectively, the right to issue their own search warrants without getting a judge’s approval first.

That provision was also absent from the Senate version of the bill promoted by Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), chairman of the chamber’s Judiciary Committee.

“It is just too automatic to have the investigator go out and preemptively call for records without any supervision ... or anything approaching probable cause,” Specter said.

Specter and the bill’s co-sponsor, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), said they would be willing to discuss permitting administrative subpoenas during a declared emergency and if there was some kind of oversight.

Civil liberties advocates said the limits supported by the Republicans amount to cosmetic changes.

“Lawmakers had the opportunity to fix what they got wrong the first time, and instead partisan politics prevailed,” said Lisa Graves, a lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union.

But at least a few Democrats expressed optimism that the reauthorized act would have fewer impingements on citizens’ privacy than the original act.

Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said she thought there would ultimately be four versions of the bill in the two chambers that would have to be reconciled.

“My prediction is that some of these most controversial provisions will be improved,” Harman said.

Harman noted that Democrats and libertarian-minded Republicans often see eye-to-eye on efforts to curb government intrusion into the private lives of citizens.

“It’s called the unholy alliance between the left and the right that privacy matters.” Harman said. “As I’ve argued in the committee, it’s not a zero-sum game that if you get less privacy, you get more security.”