Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
July 9, 2004
WASHINGTON — Bowing to a veto threat from President Bush and heavy
pressure from its Republican leaders, the House on Thursday barely defeated an
effort to scale back the USA Patriot Act, the controversial,
administration-backed law to combat terrorism on the home front.
On a
vote of 210 to 210 — a roll call that GOP leaders extended for more than
20 minutes to sway dissident Republicans — the House rejected an amendment
that would have limited the Patriot Act by preventing the Justice Department
from searching library and bookstore records to probe individuals' reading
habits.
The amendment was backed by an odd-bedfellows coalition of
Democrats and conservative Republicans who believe the Patriot Act has gone too
far in extending the federal government's law enforcement powers. The act,
which expanded the reach of law enforcement in the hunt for terrorists, was
approved in the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks.
The House appeared on
track to pass the amendment when th e 15 minutes traditionally allotted for a
roll-call vote expired. But GOP leaders exercised their power to keep the vote
open longer — as they did for far more time in November to pass the
sweeping overhaul of the Medicare program.
About 10 Republicans who
initially supported the amendment then switched their votes, allowing it to die
on a tie vote and avoid an embarrassment to the Bush administration.
"Shame, shame, shame!" Democrats cried as the clock ticked and Republican votes
were changed.
All California Republicans and Democratic Rep. Jane
Harman of Venice voted against the proposal. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose)
voted "present." All other California Democrats voted in favor of the
amendment.
At issue was one provision of the Patriot Act, the
anti-terrorism law passed by huge bipartisan margins after the terrorist attacks
on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The amendment would have blocked a
section of the act that requires libraries, booksellers and others to release
information about the reading habits of people under government investigation
using a lesser standard of probable cause than is required under a normal
criminal investigation.
The American Library Assn., which supported
the amendment, has called that section of the act "a present danger to the
constitutional rights and privacy rights of library users."
The American
Booksellers Assn. joined the ALA and the PEN American Center, a writers
organization, in urging passage of the amendment.
After GOP leaders
prevailed, the lead Republican advocate of the amendment, Rep. C.L. "Butch"
Otter (R-Idaho), told reporters, "You win some, and some get stolen."
The cliff-hanger vote was a measure of how tenuous Bush's support is for
extending, let alone expanding, the law enforcement powers of the Patriot Act in
this election year.
Both liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans
have worried about the government overreaching into private lives, and have
joined in past efforts to roll back provisions of the Patriot Act.
Those
initiatives have never made it into law, but neither have Bush's efforts to
expand the law's reach.
The House amendment by Otter and Rep. Bernard
Sanders of Vermont, the House's only Independent, was offered to a $39.8-billion
appropriations bill funding the Justice Department, the Commerce Department and
the State Department. The debate came just as the administration was announcing
an increased risk of terrorist attacks in the U.S. this summer and fall because
of the November elections.
Supporters of the Patriot Act argued that
surveillance programs were needed to help monitor terrorist activities.
"Lives have been saved, terrorists have been disrupted and our country is safer"
because of the Patriot Act, said Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), chairman of the
House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
Advocates of the
amendment said that monitoring reading habits was an unnecessary intrusion into
citizens' privacy rights.
"Americans should have the right to read
without fearing that Big Brother is looking over their shoulders and peeking
into their personal lives to find out what they've been checking out of the
library," said Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.).
Bush has been trying
to expand the government's powers under the Patriot Act, and on Wednesday he had
threatened to veto the appropriations bill if it included the bipartisan
amendment to scale back the law.
The appropriations bill easily passed
the House, 397 to 18, and now goes to the Senate, which is considering its own
bipartisan proposal to scale back the powers of the Patriot Act.