Press Room

AAI in the News

More Concern About Rights from the Right

By David Sarasohn
The Oregonian
Posted on Wednesday September 8, 2004

In an odd corner and an odd theme in a week of Bush triumphalism, the conservative super-strategist Grover Norquist remembered his testimony three years earlier, warning the U.S. Senate about passing the USA Patriot Act.

“My first recommendation to the senators was that you read the bill. They all laughed,” recalled Norquist, who heads both the powerful Americans for Tax Reform and a loose alliance of groups tending rightward.

“They had no intention of reading the bill. Their staff had no intention of reading the bill. They were going to pass it.”

To anyone who recalls the atmosphere of fall 2001, Norquist’s assessment of the politics then seems about right. And to people watching developments over the past three years, his next point also fits:

“Right and left, we need to understand that accretions of power are dangerous,” said Norquist—who didn’t like Bill Clinton’s Justice Department any better. “That’s what prosecutors do. They want more power.”

Norquist spoke at an unusual event, in the midst of a convention where speakers mentioned the Patriot Act only to praise it, and to point out what a wimp John Kerry was for expressing concerns about constitutional rights. The event also took place on a particularly significant day for the issue—more than the panelists knew at the time.

Twenty-two stories above East 57th Street, the panel on the Patriot Act was sponsored by the American Conservative Union and the Arab American Institute—two groups not always in the same sentence—and the politically connected law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, providing the premises. Besides Norquist it featured former Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga.—a former attack dog against Bill Clinton now become an ACLU consultant—and three attorneys formerly of the federal government.

But Norquist’s and Barr’s positions, and the occasion of the Republican convention for the panel, underlined a rising new theme of the Patriot Act debate:

Civil liberties—not just for left-wingers any more.

The core of the Fourth Amendment, Barr declared, was that “government cannot gather evidence against somebody without a good reason. The government is now gathering evidence against citizens and those lawfully in this country based on no evidence whatever.”

Recalling his own support of the Patriot Act, Barr went on to say, “I do regret the vote. The basis on which it was presented to the Congress was not accurate.”

Concerns about some aspects of the Patriot Act, and other Justice Department strategies, have been particularly strong among the Arab American community, leading to the co-sponsorship of the event. The combined conservative-Arab interest was symbolized by a figure in the back of the room, introduced as “someone universally respected as the pre-eminent Arab American”—John Sununu, former governor of New Hampshire and White House chief of staff to Bush the elder.

“We are not looking at the problems that cause the problems,” complained Sununu. “When prosecutors begin on a terror investigation and get nowhere, and grasp at the straw of a technical IRS violation or a technical immigration violation to justify the stupidity of a three-year investigation, we are in serious trouble.”

That day, 500 miles west in Detroit, the Justice Department released a 60-page filing asking a federal judge to drop terrorism charges against four North African men arrested soon after Sept. 11—indictments that had once led Attorney General John Ashcroft to hold a news conference claiming a major terrorism victory. The prosecution, admitted the Justice Department, had kept information from the defense, “created a record filled with misleading inferences that such information did not exist” and described a drawing as a plan of a U.S. Air Force base even though experts called it a doodled map of the Middle East.

Dropping the terror investigation, the Justice Department said it would refile the immigration charges.

On the same day, the case provided a perspective when one of the former government lawyers insisted nobody went into government to abuse power.

“The Constitution is not designed for people we can trust,” responded Norquist. “It’s designed because, from time to time, people we don’t trust get into government.”

When you think about it, it’s a very conservative idea.