After: How America Confronted The Sept. 12 Era

But to Ashcroft's opponents at the ACLU--and, now, on the Republican right in the Judiciary Committee--it was one thing to have a special court al-low a shortcut around the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable search and seizure if the target was a Russian who worked at the United Nations mission and was suspected of being a spy. It was something else to allow that shortcut to target a Muslim American who had worked for the last 10 years at a pizza parlor in Paterson, New Jersey. Thus, the provisions that Barr and his colleagues found unacceptable cut to the core of what Ashcroft was trying to do.

For Ashcroft, it was an appalling turn of events. The proposed law, which through a clever acronym construction was called the USA Patriot Act (as in Provide Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism), was, in Ashcroft's eyes, falling into the business-as-usual legislative hopper. They didn't understand that we were at war, and the President had told him that he was the one who had to stop the next attack.

"Every day that passes with outdated statutes and old rules of engagement is a day that terrorists have a competitive advantage," Ashcroft told the Senate Judiciary Committee. "Until Congress makes these changes, we are fighting an unnecessary uphill battle."

MONDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2001

In the years before Sensenbrenner took over as chairman, the House Judiciary Committee had been the most notoriously partisan group of politicians in the country. The committee, which had started the impeachment process against President Clinton rolling with its raucous 1998 hearings and vote, had firebrands on the Republican right, matched by a healthy contingent of strident Democrats on the left. Yet this afternoon, the committee voted 36-0 to approve a scaled-back version of Ashcroft's Patriot Act.

Romero and Murphy weren't thrilled, but they were satisfied that the sharpest edges of the Patriot Act had been blunted. This bill did not give Ashcroft the expanded authority he wanted to break into homes and search them secretly, or to detain immigrants indefinitely simply by declaring he had "reason to believe" the person was involved in terrorism. It also narrowed Ashcroft's proposed definition of terrorism, and cut back on the latitude he had sought to monitor e-mail correspondence. Also, all the new wiretapping and monitoring authority given the feds under the act would expire at the end of 2003 unless Congress renewed it--a provision that Sensenbrenner thought critical to preserving Congress's leverage and oversight authority.