Sadly, the ABC-Facebook debate isn't being carried in California. But local affiliate WMUR is streaming it on the web. Click here for a link.

Senator Hillary Clinton just made a remarkable charge against her senate colleague and presidential rival Barack Obama. In a heated moment when she tried to portray him as an unknown, flip-flopping quantity she said: "You said you would vote against the PATRIOT Act – you came to the senate and voted for it."

I spent the entire year of 2005, and part of 2006 covering the blow-by-blow re-authorization of the PATRIOT Act. The reality is that Obama wasn't in the senate in 2001, and then when he was, he was one of of a small band of senators who actually jumped in at the last minute to *oppose *the re-authorization of the legislation without more checks in what was a pretty bad bill that sought to remove what was left of the existing checks against abuses of the government's investigative powers.

Ultimately everyone in the senate (apart from Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin) voted "for" for the PATRIOT Act and most senators voted for its subsequent re-authorization. The disagreement was in the details, as the the readers of THREAT LEVEL well know.

Obama's response: "What I think that is important that we don't do, is try to distort each others' records."

Governor Bill Richardson's comment on the exchange: "Well, I've been in a lot of hostage negotiation situations that have been a lot more civil than this!"

Here's a link to what Obama said on the senate floor in February 2006 when Congress once again took up debate over the re-authorization of the legislation:

Mr. OBAMA: Mr. President, 4 years ago, following one of the most devastating attacks in our Nation's history, Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act to give our Nation's law enforcement the tools they needed to track down terrorists who plot and lurk within our own borders and all over the world–terrorists who, right now, are looking to exploit weaknesses in our laws and our security to carry out even deadlier attacks than we saw on September 11th. We all agreed that we needed legislation to make it harder for suspected terrorists to go undetected in this country. Americans everywhere wanted that. But soon after the PATRIOT Act passed, a few years before I ever arrived in the Senate, I began hearing concerns from people of every background and political leaning that this law didn't just provide law enforcement the powers it needed to keep us safe, but powers it didn't need to invade our privacy without cause or suspicion. Now, at times this issue has tended to degenerate into an ``either- or'' type of debate. Either we protect our people from terror or we protect our most cherished principles. But that is a false choice. It asks too little of us and assumes too little about America.

Let me be clear: this compromise is not as good as the Senate version of the bill, nor is it as good as the SAFE Act that I have cosponsored. I suspect the vast majority of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle feel the same way. But, it's still better than what the House originally proposed. This compromise does modestly improve the PATRIOT Act by strengthening civil liberties protections without sacrificing the tools that law enforcement needs to keep us safe. In this compromise: We strengthened judicial review of both national security letters, the administrative subpoenas used by the FBI, and Section 215 orders, which can be used to obtain medical, financial and other personal records.

We established hard-time limits on sneak-and-peak searches and limits on roving wiretaps.

We protected most libraries from being subject to national security letters.

We preserved an individual's right to seek counsel and hire an attorney without fearing the FBI's wrath.

And we allowed judicial review of the gag orders that accompany Section 215 searches. The compromise is far from perfect. I would have liked to see stronger judicial review of national security letters and shorter time limits on sneak and peak searches, among other things. Senator Feingold has proposed several sensible amendments–that I support–to address these issues. Unfortunately, the Majority Leader is preventing Senator Feingold from offering these amendments through procedural tactics. That is regrettable because it flies in the face of the bipartisan cooperation that allowed the Senate to pass unanimously its version of the Patriot Act–a version that balanced security and civil liberty, partisanship and patriotism. The Majority Leader's tactics are even more troubling because we will need to work on a bipartisan basis to address national security challenges in the weeks and months to come. In particular, members on both sides of the aisle will need to take a careful look at President Bush's use of warrantless wiretaps and determine the right balance between protecting our security and safeguarding our civil liberties. This is a complex issue. But only by working together and avoiding election-year politicking will we be able to give our government the necessary tools to wage the war on terror without sacrificing the rule of law. So, I will be supporting the PATRIOT Act compromise. But I urge my colleagues to continue working on ways to improve the civil liberties protections in the PATRIOT Act after it is reauthorized.

See Also: