Affirming the rights of Americans

While Kranich and her committee were educating residents, the House of Representatives, cowering to Presidential powers, overwhelmingly supported making permanent the entire PATRIOT Act, including those sections that intruded upon civil liberties.

The Senate was more reluctant and 52 of the 100 senators, including 8 Republicans, wrote a letter to the Senate leadership calling for a 3-month extension - later raised to 6 months - to allow for a calming period and a time to build into the 4-year-old Act new citizen safeguards.

“This obstruction is inexcusable,” a furious President Bush lashed out after learning of the letter. Bush demanded the Senate follow the wishes of the House. Again invoking the 9-11 bunker mentality he had constructed to explain most of his actions, Bush raged that the “senators obstructing the PATRIOT Act need to understand that the expiration of this vital law will endanger America and will leave us in a weaker position in the fight against brutal killers.”

With the Act mired in controversy, Kranich took a new approach. “We appealed to their oaths of office,” says Kranich, who spent hours talking with members of council and the police, assuring them that when they took their oaths of office they promised to uphold the Constitution. Petitions also helped the elected officials understand the will of the people - more than 700 residents had signed petitions in favor of the resolution. A petition to support the Act had about 50 signatures.

Nevertheless, council members were now getting threats from residents who supported the Act. Most of the letters and telephone calls centered around the fallacious argument that passing such a resolution would undermine the ability not only of the Bush-Cheney Administration to “catch terrorists”, but would hurt federal funding for State College.

Under a barrage of hate mail, combined with Presidential threats and rants, the people in State College, says Kranich, “were now getting ‘cold feet’, and there was a lot of tension”. Her committee increased its efforts to educate the people.

With Congress still arguing about extending suppression of civil liberties, about 150 people packed the borough council chambers the evening the resolution was to be introduced. Those unable to attend the meeting could watch it on local public access cable.

Fifteen spoke in favor, five opposed it. And then Nancy Kranich spoke for those who were silenced. She said she was speaking for those who were afraid to sign the petitions or speak out because they feared being watched, detained, or deported. The fear of the power of government to chill dissent is one of the greatest fears, says Kranich, and yet, “It’s easy to lose those rights if we don’t have the courage to speak up”.

The Council did pass the resolution, 6-0, telling the nation that it affirms “its strong resolve to fight terrorism, but also affirm[s] that any actions to end terrorism must not be waged at the expense of fundamental liberties, rights, and freedoms of all people regardless of race, culture, and ethnicity.” However, Mayor Bill Welch, who opposed the Resolution from the beginning, refused to sign it.

In the end Congress made 14 of the 16 “sunset” clauses permanent and extended the other 2 sections by 4 years. Congress did allow citizens to challenge the Act’s “gag order” which had forbidden anyone from disclosing they were being investigated, removed the requirement that all suspects served with a National Security Letter inform the FBI of what lawyers they consulted, removed most libraries from requirements to disclose who read what book, promised to look into the issue of civil liberties, and then claimed that the minor cosmetic changes were a “compromise”.

That “compromise” ends one year after President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney are out of office, and several thousand other Americans will have had their civil liberties compromised.