Actually, they do still have Nixon to kick around! ■
President Bush pressed Congress to renew the Patriot Act. Critics of the act have frequently been hysterical, but, as Bush noted, there have been no documented abuses of the act. Many of its contested provisions—such as the one that allows investigators, when judges consent, to conduct searches of terrorist suspects without telling them until afterward—strike us as needed tools for law enforcement. We continue to hold reservations, however, about the effort to expand Patriot by allowing terrorism investigators to issue “administrative subpoenas” without getting a judge to sign off. The argument for the subpoena power is that getting a judge’s approval is time-consuming. But it has not been established that the burden here is very great, and there is value in having some judicial oversight of executive-branch demands for information. The left-right alliance against the Patriot Act has, unfortunately, been too immersed in kookery to mount a focused critique of particular legislative proposals. Congressmen should do better—by renewing Patriot without expanding it to include administrative subpoenas. ■
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