Congress To Restore Full Patriot Act?

by JASmius

But I also can read the political tea leaves and the direction in which their winds are blowing. It's frankly astonishing to me that the Patriot Act has lasted as long as it has, particularly in the Age Of The One. Now the pendulum has swung back, public complacency has returned, and voters are demanding that our guard be let down once more. No argument is going to regain the public's attention except another mass-casualty jihadist attack, and maybe not even then, as the Garland, Texas, near-miss illustrated.

- Me, seven months ago


And now cometh Paris, and San Bernardino, and the revelation that the Obama Regime could have prevented the latter by keeping Mr. and Mrs. Farook out of the country but for their refusal to screen their social media posts, and their determination to import hundreds of thousand and millions more Muslims into this country, and now, possibly and hopefully, reconsidering the highly questionable decision to excise NSA metadata collection out of the Patriot Act and otherwise downsize U.S. internal security and intelligence capabilities may now be coming back on the table:

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says the Senate may re-open debate on National Security Agency wire-tapping authority following the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California.

The Kentucky Republican tells the Associated Press in an interview that those attacks have led to second thoughts about Congress' wisdom in limiting the authority earlier this year.

Gooood.

The divisive issue pits privacy rights proponents against those pressing for tough post-September 11th scrutiny.

Privacy for whom?  The Farooks had privacy.  Should I even have to explain the logic any farther?

Revisiting the subject could roil the Republican presidential race. The issue has become a point of dispute between two leading GOP candidates, both senators: Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas.

Translation: Remember back in the summer when Ted Cruz called Mitch McConnell a "lying, corrupt, cylinder-headed, mother!#$%ing mound of loose Hutt blubber who should go anally pleasure himself with his corncob pipe" [or words to that effect] over the Export-Import Bank on the Senate floor itself?  This is Mitchie The Kid's "receipt".  And if the Patriot Act was fully restored, everybody else other than Senator Cruz (and Trump as well, I'd imagine, and Rand Paul, but he has never mattered) would win.  A very nice two-fer for the Elderly Campbell's Soup Kid.

Not that PA will be fully restored, mind you.  It'll take at least another 9/11-level attack, and probably even worse, to restore enough sobriety to the American public to bring that about.  Such is the nature of frivolous, decadent, unserious societies that their deathwishes grow ever more stubbornly resistant to the "red of tooth and claw" facts of life in a time of war.   But merely the fact that the Senate may revisit Congress's grievously self-destructive mistake is at last a sign that the potential for that sobriety might still exist.

And perhaps also in the country's next POTUS, Trump notwithstanding.