NJ Governor Chris Christie Gives Foreign Policy Speech In New Hampshire

Chris Christie gives a speech on foreign policy in New Hampshire.

(Darren McCollester/Getty Images)

Is there anything more irritating than an acronym?

I'm thinking of those bores who insist the "tea" in "tea party" stands for "Taxed Enough Already." (Actually a backronym.) In fact, it stands for the leaves thrown into Boston Harbor in 1773 by American patriots defending their rights.

Those patriots would later be grossly slandered in an acronym for a law violating constitutional rights. The tortured explanation for the initials in the USA PATRIOT Act is "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism."

I suspect that's about all of the 315-page bill most members of Congress read when it was rushed through the month after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. A debate over that act is long overdue, and we're finally hearing it.

The act is scheduled to sunset May 31 and there's a rift in the Republican Party over whether it should be renewed. On one side is U.S. Sen. Rand Paul. The Kentucky Republican, who is among the front-runners for his party's 2016 presidential nomination. Paul argues the act represents an attack on Americans' Fourth Amendment rights regarding searches. He filibustered it last week and promises to do so again.

Among the most prominent defenders is our own Chris Christie. Christie is far down in the polls, so far that he might not make the cut for the debates if he fell much further. (Note how he doesn't even merit mention in this column about top contenders.) He'd like nothing more than to be seen as the tough-talking ex-prosecutor who is the most prominent proponent of the Patriot Act.

But there's one problem for Christie, said a Jersey guy whose columns defending constitutional rights were read by Paul during his filibuster.

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul: Standing up for constitutional rights.

"He's inches away from being a defendant himself, and is probably an unindicted co-conspirator if we could get into the mind of Paul Fishman," said Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano.

Fishman is the U.S. Attorney who recently indicted two of Christie's subordinates and got a guilty plea from a third in the Bridgegate scandal. Napolitano termed him "a model prosecutor who doesn't say one word he doesn't have to say." That makes him the polar opposite of the type of prosecutor Christie was during his tenure as U.S. Attorney in the Bush administration.

Had Gov. Christie been investigated by a grandstanding prosecutor like U.S. Attorney Christie, he might have ended up indicting himself, said Napolitano.

Never mind, though. Christie's playing the tough guy once again. Last week he termed the debate over the act "dangerous" and proclaimed "I'm the only person in this national conversation who has used the Patriot Act, signed off on it, convicted terrorists because of it."

Nonsense, said Napolitano. He noted that the Justice Department Inspector General released a report last week stating that the FBI can't point to any specific terror threats that were prevented by the Act.

Like other conservative critics of the Act, Napolitano argues that it permits the government to gather personal information on millions of law-abiding Americans without the probable cause required by the Fourth Amendment.

"They have agents physically working 24-7 in the operation centers of the telecoms," he said. "They can listen to any phone call they want. Because they capture computer data, they can listen to a conversation we had six years ago."

There's also the prospect of creeping totalitarianism. The Act's powers have already been used on garden-variety drug dealers and pornographers instead of terrorists. How long before the feds go after political activists - and even governors?

Then there are those National Security Letters. One FBI agent can direct another FBI agent to perform a search without a warrant, as required by the Fourth Amendment. Worse, the letter's recipient can be prosecuted if he or she talks about it.

That led to one of the more shameful episodes in the history of not just the PATRIOT Act but the nation. In 2006, the feds ordered four librarians in Connecticut to hand over records of patrons. All were told they would be thrown in jail if they dared mention this to anyone.

A federal Circuit Court later ruled this shreds the First Amendment. But how did such a provision ever get enacted in the first place?

That's the debate that is long overdue. But Christie seems determined to sidestep it with bombast.

"You can't enjoy your civil liberties if you're in a coffin," he bellowed last week to a TV interviewer.

That led another conservative Republican senator, Mike Lee of Utah, to term Christie's words "political pornography." Lee went on to say Christie "should be ashamed of himself" for arguing that we can't have Fourth Amendment rights as well as safety

Christie might think this debate is dangerous. But he needn't worry.

The way he's performing in the polls, there's little danger anyone's listening to him.