Deal Clears Way for Senate to Renew Disputed Patriot Act Measures

Congress prepared Tuesday to reauthorize expiring provisions of the Patriot Act as the Senate voted to end a two-month filibuster by Democrats and dissident Republicans who complained the bill ran roughshod over civil liberties.

The Senate is expected to vote today to adopt a White House-approved compromise that would reauthorize six controversial provisions of the anti-terrorism law originally set to expire at the end of 2005.

Since Jan. 1, both houses of Congress have acted twice to extend the current version of the bill, preventing those provisions from expiring. Without congressional action, they would expire March 10.

The Senate is expected to vote nearly unanimously for the compromise, which Republicans and Democrats say contains important improvements over the original Patriot Act.

That legislation, which gave law enforcement and intelligence agencies greater flexibility in tracking terrorist suspects, was passed barely a month after the Sept. 11 attacks. But it made civil liberties advocates uneasy by giving the federal government considerable leeway to wiretap and search -- with only limited judicial review -- homes, offices and business records.

Sen. John E. Sununu (R-N.H.), who led the filibuster and brokered the compromise with the White House, said he did not get all the civil liberties protections he sought but that the final version was a “substantial step forward.”

“We sent an important message -- a message that we have a group willing to work in Congress to achieve these improvements and a message to the administration that when we’re dealing with these issues, they need to be engaged and active and working toward consensus from the very beginning of the process,” Sununu said before the vote.

But Democrats who oppose the bill said it still removed too many checks and balances on law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

“Everybody in this body wants to reauthorize the Patriot Act. Many of the expiring provisions are entirely noncontroversial,” said Sen. Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.), who spearheaded opposition to the Sununu bill. “But we also need to fix the provisions that went too far, that do not contain the checks and balances necessary to protect our rights and freedoms.”

Sixty votes were needed to end debate, and the motion to do so was passed 69 to 30. Fourteen largely centrist Democrats, including California’s Dianne Feinstein, voted with all of the Senate’s 55 Republicans. Thirty Democrats, including Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, voted against ending debate.

Some Democrats who voted against ending debate -- a move known in Senate parlance as cloture -- said they did so to protest Republicans’ refusal to permit amendments to be added to the legislation, not because they opposed the bill.

The changes negotiated by Sununu and a handful of other Republicans focus mainly on national security letters, a type of subpoena that forbids recipients to disclose that they have received it. The final version of the bill would limit the gag order on disclosure to one year, at which point the recipient could challenge it in court.

In addition, the compromise would not permit national security letters to be issued to libraries when they are acting in their traditional role of providing reading materials or basic Internet access.

Libraries that are Internet service providers, however, would remain subject to such demands for information.

Civil liberties advocates said the bill did not go far enough to protect Americans from potential government abuses.

“The Patriot Act debate has come a long way, but there is still more that needs to be done to protect the rights of ordinary Americans,” said Lisa Graves, congressional liaison for the American Civil Liberties Union.