“Never would have supported it” if I had known.

“I can say that if Congress knew what the NSA had in mind in the future immediately after 9/11, the Patriot Act never would have passed, and I never would have supported it,” says Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, the architect of the Patriot Act.

“We have to have a balance of security and civil liberties. What the NSA has done, with the concurrence of both the Bush and Obama administrations, is completely forgotten about the guarantees of civil liberties.”

Critics of the Patriot Act once warned that the legislation would hand concentrated power to a less scrupulous government. Yet, in the emotional aftermath of 9/11, Sensenbrenner and other Republicans ignored Marin Van Buren’s conservative maxim: “The government should not be guided by Temporary Excitement, but by Sober Second Thought.”

Sensenbrenner now regrets being guided by temporary excitement. He has sponsored the USA Freedom Act – a bill that National Journal says “would essentially nullify the government’s ability to collect bulk metadata of Americans’ phone records.” The bill will appear before the House Judiciary Committee on Friday.





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