In order to replace several U.S. Attorneys with handpicked successors, the Bush Administration has relied on a tiny, obscure provision tucked into last year's USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act.How did it get there?
Former Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter (R-PA) slipped the language into the bill at the very last minute, according to one of the Republican managers of the bill.
Ah...the so-called "moderate," Arlen Specter stuck it in there, eh?
This is the same senator who railed on the floor of the Senate last autumn that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Gitmo detainees deserved Habeas Corpus protection, and then turned around and voted for stripping those very same protections from those detainees. He predicted, in essence, that the bill he was voting for would prove to be unconstitutional:
Arlen Specter was an unlikely steward of the demise of habeas corpus. The Pennsylvania Republican, a senator since 1980, has long been known as a moderate in his caucus, one of the few remaining in a party that has shifted sharply to the right during his career.Yet it was Specter who, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, after leading the fight to preserve habeas corpus, at the last moment voted for the Administration�s plan restricting it.
Beware of the "moderate" clothes this Senator wears.
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Tags: Arlen Specter, Patriot Act, Senate Judiciary Committee
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