After 9/11, A Swift And Powerful Change In The Law Of The Land

After 9/11, a swift and powerful change in the law of the land

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BY J. SCOTT ORR
STAR-LEDGER WASHINGTON BUREAU
Sunday, July 10, 2005

WASHINGTON -- It was half past noon on Sept. 19, 2001, when a small phalanx of administration officials strode down a second-floor hallway in the Capitol building, headed for a secret meeting in a room nearly hidden behind a bank of elevators. Inside, they faced a group of the nation's most powerful lawmakers.

Carrying a 40-page document labeled "The Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001," the officials had come to make a case for providing federal investigators with new tools to fight terrorism on American soil. They were led by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, who wasted little time getting to the point.

Accept this bill in its entirety, he demanded, and pass it within a week. The reception from leading members of Congress, Republican and Democrat alike, was chilly. Only eight days had passed since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, but no one in the room seemed inclined to pick up the gauntlet Ashcroft had thrown down.

Dick Armey, a hard-boiled Texas conservative who at the time was the GOP majority leader in the House, remembers being unimpressed by arguments from the Justice Department's "Harvard- trained lawyers" -- and he told them so.

"Like this stuff is new?" one of the lawyers replied. "We've been asking for it for a long time."

"I know you have," Armey shot back, "and we've been saying 'no' for some time."

The meeting was adjourned with no commitments made.

***

The debate over the USA Patriot Act that began on that warm, overcast day in the nation's capital would quickly become an extraordinary Washington power struggle, pitting a White House determined to expand its arsenal of anti-terrorism weapons against a coalition of balky lawmakers and special interest groups committed to protecting civil liberties.

The public side of the process was dominated by the horrific aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, by the swift buildup for war in Afghanistan and by fresh threats like the anthrax scare that briefly paralyzed Capitol Hill. The only substantive public hearings on the act, held by the House Judiciary Committee, were largely overlooked amid the cascade of events.

But the important battles took place in backrooms across Washington, as the Republican-controlled House and the Democrat- controlled Senate negotiated separately with the Justice Department. The meetings were marked by strong-arm tactics and a fearful sense that the world, quite suddenly, was a far more dangerous place.

When President Bush signed the Patriot Act on Oct. 26, just 45 days after 9/11, the bill looked much like the document that Ashcroft and his colleagues had presented to lawmakers on Sept. 19. The result infuriated many members of Congress, who believed they had been sidelined, or even betrayed, as the final deal was sealed.

Among other things, the Patriot Act dramatically expanded the information federal investigators can access and the number of officials who can see it. It also changed some rules regarding the detention of immigrants. Many of the act's key provisions are scheduled to expire at the end of this year, unless Congress decides to renew them.

Hearings on the expiring provisions began in April and May, and just last month the House voted to deny funding for a federal program designed to monitor certain library records under the Patriot Act. Thursday's bombings in London have added a sense of urgency to the debate, as officials scramble to determine if similar attacks are planned here.

As the Dec. 31 deadline for renewal of the act approaches, a look back at how it was passed -- the frightening backdrop of events, the administration's lobbying strategy, the fear of delay that drove many members of Congress to pass a bill they barely understood -- offers unusual insights into the ongoing argument over what it should take to fight terror at freedom's edge.

***

The U.S. Department of Justice building sits on Pennsylvania Avenue, about halfway between the White House and the Capitol. The seven-story structure occupies an entire block in the heart of Washington. Thirty-foot-tall metal doors flank the main entrance, below an inscription that reads, in part, "Justice is the great interest of man on earth."

The nation's top law enforcement officer at the time of the 9/11 attacks was Ashcroft, a short, stocky man closing in on 60 who had brought to the Justice Department the same religious conservatism that defined his long career as a senator from Missouri.

Ashcroft is by all accounts a serious, stubborn man, the son of a preacher, and his only known diversion is playing the piano and singing gospel tunes. He had lost his Senate seat in the 2000 elections when his opponent died in a plane crash late in the campaign and his widow replaced him on the ballot.

In the hours after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Ashcroft received a clear mandate from President Bush, the man who had rescued him from political purgatory: Do everything possible to prevent this from happening again.

For the nuts and bolts of the government's legislative plan, Ashcroft turned to Viet Dinh, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Office of Legal Policy at the Justice Department.

Dinh, a refugee from Vietnam with disobedient hair, is a man who seems to be in a perpetual hurry, speaking in a slightly accented staccato. His suite of offices on the fourth floor of the Justice Department building quickly became headquarters for a group of legislative draftsmen.

In the days that followed, Dinh and his team got very little sleep as they sought input from every lawyer and investigator in the department, including the FBI. When Dinh did doze off for a few hours, it was on the leather couch in his office.

"We stayed at the office and asked a whole bunch of people to stay at the office until we got the job done," Dinh said. "We sent e- mails out to the field and asked all the investigators and prosecutors to send us in suggestions and ideas regarding the response that we need to take at this time."

As the e-mails popped up on computer screens in Dinh's command center, the team members weighed each one by a set of standards they had developed at the outset.

"One, is this operationally necessary?" he recalled. "Two, is this wholly consistent with the Constitution and enabling statutes of the Department of Justice? Three, are there any unintended consequences ... of the policy and, if there are, how can we put in safeguards ... to minimize those negative consequences, including effects they may have on civil liberties?"

The plan that Dinh and his colleagues drew up was complex, offering technical amendments to existing law in some areas and creating broad new powers in others. It gave the government new access to business, library, medical and shopping records, allowed for greater access to voice and data communications, authorized the widespread sharing of information gathered by criminal investigators and spies, and changed detention policies for noncitizens.

A week after he had shut himself in his office, Dinh joined Ashcroft for the Sept. 19 trip to Capitol Hill. Little did he know, as he walked down the hallway toward that initial meeting with lawmakers, that the hardest work was still ahead.

***

As word of the Justice Department's proposal rippled across Washington's concentric circles of influence, it came, eventually, to Laura Murphy, the head of the lobbying office at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Murphy is known for her stealthy style. She is soft-spoken and exceedingly polite -- traits that mask an ideological aggressiveness and hard-wired dedication to the defense of civil liberties.

By that time, Murphy had already been working round-the- clock to assemble a diverse coalition willing to fight any anti-terror legislation that she viewed as posing threats to civil liberties. She and her chief aide, Gregory Nojeim, had begun plotting strategies on a legal pad in a luncheonette at a Dupont Circle hotel just hours after 9/11 attacks.

"Greg and I looked at each other, and I don't know who said it, but we said, 'We're going to have another anti-terrorism bill,'" Murphy recalled.

The ACLU headquarters, located at the time in a white stucco building on Maryland Avenue, a few blocks from the Capitol, had become home base for an unlikely collection of groups, more than 100 in all, concerned about the implications of the pending bill.

Among them: the conservative Eagle Foundation, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the American Conservative Union, the libertarian CATO Institute and the National Rifle Association.

Civil liberties can mean different things to different people but what concerned all of the groups was the expanded power of federal investigators to monitor American citizens.

As their plan took shape, Murphy called on allies who participated in a similar fight over anti- terrorism legislation that was passed in 1996 after the Oklahoma City bombing. At that time, a similarly ambitious law enforcement proposal was trimmed back by a diverse coalition of interest groups and lawmakers.

One of those lawmakers was Bob Barr, the conservative House Judiciary Committee member from Georgia who rarely agrees with the ACLU's mostly liberal agenda. Another ally on the Judiciary Committee was Bobby Scott, a liberal Democrat from Virginia with a reputation as a leading voice in Congress on civil rights.

"We knew that time was of the essence," Barr recalled. "We knew the administration would be pushing very hard for swift enactment with either no or minimal changes. We wanted to make sure our concerns, particularly those that reflected input from the broad spectrum of outside groups, would be a part of the mix from the very beginning."

On Sept. 21, two days after the Justice Department unveiled its proposal, Barr, Scott and fellow Judiciary Committee members Chris Cannon (R-Utah), Jeff Flake (R- Ariz.), and Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) gathered with representatives of the ACLU and other groups in a nondescript committee room in the Longworth House Office Building.

The session resulted in a letter to the Judiciary Committee's Republican chairman, James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, the committee's ranking Democrat, John Conyers of Michigan, and others. The letter rated the various sections of the bill on a scale of I (do not appear to raise significant concerns) to IV (unacceptable as written).

Group I items included data- sharing among federal agencies, while group IV items included so- called "sneak and peek" searches, which allow authorities to search a home or other location without notifying the target for a period of time.

"We do not believe that we will be serving law enforcement, the intelligence community, or the American public if we move as quickly as we are being urged by the (Justice) Department," the group wrote.

***

End Part I

On Sept. 30, anyone tuning in to CBS' "Face the Nation" would have seen newsman Bob Schieffer chatting with Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the ranking Republican on the committee.

Careful observers might have noticed something else, too: a palpable sense of urgency.

Hatch was clearly worried about the pace of negotiations on the House side. "We've got to get this done," he said. "If we don't do it, we risk the whole country, or at least ... another incident that could cost the American people very, very dearly."

Members of the House Judiciary Committee and their staff missed the broadcast. They spent the weekend just as they had spent the previous week, in the committee's main meeting room.

It was here, in a grand space dominated by a three-tiered hardwood dais, that House members would iron out their version of the administration's bill, which would ultimately go head to head with a competing measure crafted by the Senate.

The Judiciary Committee is one of the most polarized in Congress. As if to remind the members of the panel's difficult past, the session took place below a portrait of Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.), who chaired the committee three years earlier during the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.

On this weekend, the dais and its boardroom-style chairs were empty as casually dressed lawmakers, aides and representatives of the administration sat around a giant rectangular wooden table usually occupied by witnesses. The mood was informal but focused. Documents, pads, pens and Styrofoam coffee cups were scattered about.

"What we did as a committee was go through the (Justice Department) bill provision by provision to find out what is actually helpful and has some reasonable semblance of checks and balances," recalled Scott. "It was a lot of work, a lot of meetings, a lot of late nights."

"The atmosphere was tense, but collaborative," said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat. The usually divided panel seemed inspired by the mission, she said, cobbling together legislation compromise by compromise. Even the Justice Department staffers in the room, she said, seemed swept up in the effort to get a bill everyone could support.

The bill these sessions would yield included provisions similar to those requested by Ashcroft and later accepted by the Senate, but with subtle changes in language intended to protect against overreaching by federal investigators.

For example, the administration wanted "one-stop shopping" for warrants and court orders that would apply nationwide; the House bill would have allowed such orders, but set restrictions on what judges could issue them.

In another instance, Ashcroft sought "roving wiretaps" to keep track of suspects who switched phones often; the House bill would have allowed them only with a special court finding.

By Oct. 4, the committee had wrapped up its prep work. The scattered papers and coffee cups had been removed, and committee members were back in their business clothes, seated at the dais.

For Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat from the West Side of Manhattan who considered himself one of the staunchest civil libertarians in the room, what followed was pleasantly astonishing.

"There was real and honest debate on the amendments and some were accepted and some weren't and there were real votes and they weren't party-line votes," he said. "As we went though the amendments ... one by one we checked off my objections. And at the end of it, I didn't have any left. And to my surprise I found myself voting for the bill."

Committee members from both parties credited Sensenbrenner with allowing the compromise to take shape. At 58, the tall, stout Wisconsin millionaire had just inherited the chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee the year before.

After just three hours, Sensenbrenner slammed his gavel down, signaling the adjournment of a most unusual meeting. The committee vote had been unanimous, 36-0. There were smiles, a smattering of applause and looks of delight.

"Any time you get unanimity on the Judiciary Committee it's like some foreign substance must have wafted into the room that has everybody in a trance," recalled Flake, the Arizona Republican.

***

As the House Judiciary Committee was moving toward unity on its bill, a Senate measure was taking shape in a more tightly controlled fashion during secret negotiations between Leahy, Hatch, Ashcroft and their respective staffs.

Leahy, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, took the lead. The tall, bald Grateful Dead fan, a liberal Democrat, is a longtime champion of civil liberties, and from the outset that he was torn between the demands of national security and personal privacy.

The Senate negotiations were pursued virtually round-the-clock between Sept. 19 and Oct. 4, as the parties sought to reconcile the administration's draft and a separate bill drawn up by Leahy's staff. The two measures had much in common, but an initial spirit of cooperation between Leahy and the administration faded quickly.

Beryl Howell, Leahy's lead negotiator, would later blame the shift in tone on Ashcroft's unwillingness to compromise.

"The administration was not interested in congressional deliberations, compromise, or stopping to discuss details," she wrote in the George Washington University Law Review. "Instead, it wanted legislation passed immediately."

Howell insists that Leahy did not bow to Ashcroft during the process. But while the negotiations on the Senate side did yield some modifications to Ashcroft's original proposals, the attorney general got virtually all of the powers he sought.

One sticking point during the negotiations involved the administration's demand for "sneak and peak" searches. Although such searches have long been allowed by courts in many jurisdictions across the country in organized crime and drug cases, the administration was seeking to embed the practice in federal statute.

The Ashcroft proposal called for courts to approve warrants for these searches when authorities could show that notifying the targets might result in "adverse results," including when notification would "seriously jeopardize an investigation." On these important points, the administration got what it wanted.

Still, Leahy did modify the provisions somewhat. The final version required an additional court finding to allow seizures of property, and it gave judges the power to limit the delay of notification on a case-by-case basis.

According to Howell, the bill was nearly finalized during marathon talks over the weekend of Sept. 29-30. But the deal unraveled when Ashcroft, during an Oct. 2 meeting with Leahy and Hatch, backed away from agreements his agents had made.

"The Justice Department and the White House basically were reopening some deals that had already been cooked and were done and on paper," she said in a recent interview. "Rather than crossing things off the list to negotiate, things had been added to the list."

After the session with Ashcroft, Leahy told his team to go back to the drawing table. While Leahy went about other business, Ashcroft and Hatch headed out to address a scrum of reporters at the Ohio Clock, an 8-foot-tall timepiece that stands just outside the Senate chamber.

"I'm deeply concerned about the rather slow pace at which we ... seem to be making this come true for America," Ashcroft said. "We need to be able to put tools in place that would help us disrupt or prevent any additional terrorist acts to which we might be susceptible."

Two days later, the Senate bill was completed. It met nearly all of Ashcroft's demands on surveillance, evidence-gathering, detention and information-sharing between law enforcement and intelligence agents.

***

End Part II

If senators weren't already feeling pressure when the bill was brought to the floor for a vote by the full chamber on Oct. 11, the FBI's first terrorist threat warning further stoked the tension.

"Certain information, while not specific as to target, gives the government reason to believe that there may be additional terrorist attacks within the United States and against U.S. interests overseas over the next several days," it said.

Shortly before noon, President Bush strode to the podium at a Pentagon ceremony to mark the one-month anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. "America will never relent in this war on terror," he said to applause.

Later, Bush held a news conference in the East Room of the White House, where he amplified the FBI's warning without adding specifics: "I am aware of the intelligence that caused the warning to be issued, and it was a general threat on America," he said.

It was against this backdrop that the Senate debate began. The bill was put on the fastest of tracks, with less than seven hours set aside for discussion. There was only one opponent: Sen. Russell Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat, who offered a forceful, but doomed, dissent.

"There is no doubt that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorists," Feingold said. "But that would not be a country in which we would want to live, and ... that country would not be America."

Feingold's efforts to amend the bill were quickly beaten back, and his objections were dismissed by a longtime ally -- Democrat Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Senate Majority Leader.

"We have a job to do. The clock is ticking. The work needs to get done. We have to make our best judgment about what is possible, and that process goes on," Daschle said. "Let's move on and finish this bill."

As the debate continued in a largely pro forma fashion, Leahy retired to a small dogleg of a room just off the Senate floor, an exclusive hideaway that is off-limits to everyone but members of Congress.

By Senate standards, the Democratic cloakroom is austere, with an arched ceiling accented with wisps of gold filigree. A royal blue carpet with a pattern of maroon- and-gold florets covers the floor. To the right of the corner reception desk there is a short corridor filled with old-fashioned hardwood telephone booths, 10 in all.

It was close to 9 p.m. when several members of the House Judiciary Committee entered the cloakroom through the back door, over by the phone booths. Their mission, Lofgren recalls, was "to try to come to a more balanced bill."

As the House members ascended the carpeted steps into the room, a well-used coffee station was the first thing they saw and smelled. The way things turned out, they were there barely long enough for a cup a coffee.

Lofgren said the House Democrats came into the cloakroom session knowing the Senate bill would pass, but hoping to get enough Democrats to vote against it to demonstrate that the measure had flaws and to prompt support for the modified measure offered by the House Judiciary Committee.

Their pleas were flatly rejected.

"They were under a great deal of pressure," Scott said of the Democratic senators. "There was some concern and they listened, but we just weren't successful in our effort. Had we been able to slow it down ... I think we could have made some changes."

"During all my years in the Congress, if I could change any vote, that would certainly be the one," said former Sen. Robert Torricelli of New Jersey. "I knew it was the wrong vote at the time, but the pressure and the fear were extraordinary. There was no doubt it had to pass."

At around midnight, the measure was passed 96-1, with only Feingold dissenting.

***

As they headed back from their unsuccessful meeting in the cloakroom, walking beneath the soaring majesty of the Capitol dome, there was discontent and frustration among the House Democrats.

The mood would have been even darker if they had known what was happening at that very moment during a secret meeting a short distance away, in a conference room down an unmarked hall.

The Lincoln Room, as it is known, is one of Washington's ultimate backrooms, located within the House Speaker's suite of offices. It is decorated in Federal style with a large mahogany table and leather-backed chairs. There is a painting of Abraham Lincoln with the Emancipation Proclamation on one side of the room, and a window offering a splendid view of the national mall and the Washington Monument on another.

There, in a lengthy session attended on-and-off by Speaker Dennis Hastert, Sensenbrenner and staffers, the House Judiciary Committee's measure was being reworked, with assistance from Dinh. As midnight approached and the Senate prepared to pass its bill, the talks were nearing conclusion.

The result of that session was a virtual copy of the Senate bill, with almost all of the House Judiciary Committee's compromises stripped out. Members of the committee wouldn't see the 140-page finished product until the following day, shortly before the full House was scheduled to vote on it.

"They just took what we reported out and threw it in the garbage," said Nadler, the New York Democrat who was a leading architect of the Judiciary Committee bill. "I was incensed by the process, never mind what was in the bill. We heard this was happening, that it had happened or it was happening ... but we didn't see the bill until that morning."

Despite the expressions of shock and betrayal from Nadler and many civil liberties advocates, Dinh dismissed much of the criticism as the kind of conspiracy-theory talk that might come from liberal filmmaker and activist Michael Moore.

"This is what I call the 'Fahrenheit 9/11' allegation -- that there was a last-minute switch. There's nothing sinister or mysterious about it," said Dinh, who today is a professor at Georgetown Law School. "It's just a matter of inter- chamber politics that goes on in these processes."

Dinh also defended the swift pace of the negotiations. "In most normal legislative sessions they handle about 50 different bills and you'll be lucky if you get legislators to get focused on any one particular provision and one particular bill," he said.

"The process in the six weeks following Sept. 11 was that this was the only game in town. Basically, every single person ... was focused on this one particular bill, simply because the country was in a very focused mood after the catastrophic attacks of Sept. 11."

As midnight came and went, the negotiators in the Lincoln Room struck a final compromise over the name of the bill -- which, as is often the case in Washington, had changed several times since it was first unveiled.

Combining the Senate's "Uniting and Strengthening America Act" and the House's "Providing Appropriate Tools to Restrict Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act" they called their measure the USA PATRIOT Act.

With the deal set, the bill was printed with a time stamp of 3:45 a.m., Oct. 12, 2001.

***

When the sun rose only a few hours later, the stage was set for a dramatic showdown.

As Nadler and his colleagues on the House Judiciary Committee got their first glimpse at the freshly minted draft that had replaced their own, the administration orchestrated a series of media events for the president and other administration officials.

The day played out at a dizzying pace:

11:58 a.m. Appearing at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington to address a March of Dimes Leadership Conference, Bush talked about the high stakes in the war on terror and declared: "We must fight this enemy wherever he plans or hides or runs -- abroad, and here at home."

1:33 p.m. At the Department of Health and Human Services, Secretary Tommy Thompson stood with Ashcroft to brief reporters on a new case of anthrax involving an NBC employee. "The public needs to understand that our public health system is on heightened sense of alert for any diseases that may come from any kind of biological attack or any kind of terrorist attack," Thompson said.

2:15 p.m. "Bienvenidos," President Bush said to applause at a gathering in the White House's East Room. He was there to sign an executive order setting up a commission on educational excellence for Hispanic Americans, but he used the opportunity to talk about the threat of terrorism. "Our nation is still in danger," he said. "But the government is doing everything in our power to protect our citizenry."

2:18 p.m. Less than 4 1/2 hours after Nadler and other House members first got a copy of the bill crafted overnight by Hastert, Sensenbrenner and Dinh, the full House moved to consider the Patriot Act.

2:50 p.m. Giving voice to the anger among members of the Judiciary Committee, Democrat Maxine Waters of California attacked the new bill. "Mr. Speaker," she said, "we had a bipartisan bill and John Ashcroft destroyed it. The attorney general has fired the first partisan shot since Sept. 11."

3:44 p.m. At the Justice Department, Ashcroft held a news conference, where he discussed the Patriot Act. "I ask the congressional leadership to send the president a bill to sign right away. I can say with enthusiasm that they should not delay. We need these anti-terrorism tools now."

4:26 p.m.: The House voted 337-79 to pass the bill. Among those casting reluctant votes for the bill were Barr, Lofgren and Armey. Among those voting no were Nadler, Scott, Conyers and Waters.

The day's events were witnessed with something like despair at the ACLU headquarters. Murphy watched the news on television in her cluttered office, surrounded by aides sadly hunkered down in chairs and on the floor. Every surface of the room was piled high with books, papers, pizza boxes and drink containers.

Her team was exhausted and frustrated after spending days trying to drum up opposition to a process that increasingly had an aura of inevitability about it. Even among the most liberal members of Congress, some of whom had supported civil liberties causes for decades, there was little stomach for fighting the legislation.

"We knew that this bill was going to pass. The question was, how many votes could we get? ... At the time, we were asking members to vote 'no' because we felt there were so many constitutional issues," Murphy said. "We were just totally demoralized about how few members spoke up."

***

It took the Congress another 12 days to iron out the modest differences between the two bills, but during that time fear only tightened its grip on Capitol Hill.

The anthrax threat, which had shown up earlier in only two remote cases, came to Congress on Oct. 15 in a pair of mysterious envelopes. Lawmakers, staff and visitors had their noses swabbed, and medical workers dispensed the antibiotic Cipro. As investigators combed the Capitol building for clues, offices were shuttered on both sides of the hill.

With so much going on, the final votes on the Patriot Act, as amended to reconcile the House and Senate versions, were barely noted: The House passed it by a vote of 357-66 on Oct. 24, and the Senate approved it, 98-1, the next day.

Ashcroft issued a statement claiming a near complete victory: "A new era in America's fight against terrorism, made tragically necessary by the attacks of September 11th, is about to begin," he said.

Murphy, at the ACLU, broke down: "I remember the final vote on the conference report and tears springing to my eyes," she said. "Sort of tears of resignation and exhaustion and I felt like 'Oh my God, what is happening to my country?'"

At 9:49 a.m. on Oct. 26 -- less than 24 hours after the Senate gave its final stamp of approval -- Bush addressed a gathering of lawmakers and others in the East Room of the White House, a copy of the Patriot Act sitting atop a desk, bill- signing pens at the ready.

"I commend the House and Senate for the hard work they put into this legislation. Members of Congress and their staffs spent long nights and weekends to get this important bill to my desk," the president said.

"I want to thank Attorney General John Ashcroft," he added, "for spending a lot of time on the Hill to make the case for a balanced piece of legislation."

Although the bill included almost everything the Justice Department wanted, there was one significant exception. Sensenbrenner, despite helping to scuttle the House Judiciary Committee's bill, had insisted on language that allowed many provisions of the act to expire in four years, unless they were reauthorized.

It is these "sunsets" that have prompted a second round of debate about the Patriot Act this year, re-energizing civil libertarians like Murphy who remain bitter about their 2001 defeat. "Thank god for that one thing," Murphy said. "The sunsets were the only thing that gave us hope."

The Dec. 31 expiration date has also brought fresh efforts from supporters of the Patriot Act to make it permanent. Even Sensenbrenner, who fought for the sunset provisions, argued for the act's swift renewal after last week's bombings in London. "Now, more than ever," he said, "it is incumbent upon Congress and the American people not to let our guard down."

© 2005 The Star Ledger

End