Posted by Liz Kaplan, Legislative Assistant

After so many hullabaloos last fall over the Patriot Act reauthorization process, including a bi-partisan effort to block the bill unless it included better civil liberties protections, it seemed to be with relatively little fanfare that the Senate voted 89-to-10 yesterday to renew the bill.

The legislation voted on yesterday does include some positive clarifications of some of the most controversial aspects of the Patriot Act (including Section 215 orders, National Security Letters, and the privacy of library records), as described by Senator John Sununu (R-NH), a key critic of the Patriot Act last fall. However, other civil liberties advocates, such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and Senator Russell Feingold (D-WI), the only Senator to vote against the Patriot Act’s original passage in 2001, argued that this week’s compromise is a missed opportunity to truly address some of the law’s worst flaws. Yesterday’s vote virtually guaranteed the reauthorization bill’s passage, although there will be a final vote in the House next week.

In some ways, the final days of this debate have been the least exciting. Public policy die-hards could tune in to the debate on C- SPAN and mainstream media paid lip service to the final deals that had to be struck between the White House and GOP leaders in order to quell a few lingering concerns from December, but in general, concerns about the Patriot Act seem to have been vastly overshadowed this winter by the current focus on the National Security Agency’s warrant-less wiretapping and other security debates. Furthermore, as Senator Fiengold suggested in his final comments on the Senate floor, despite the fact that the Patriot Act reauthorization bill extends 14 provisions of the Act permanently and two more through 2009, civil liberties advocates do not seem to see this vote as the end of the national discussion of these issues. As a friend and passionate civil liberties buff told me after yesterday’s vote, “Now we need to regroup and think up new strategies for bringing about the changes we want to see. For example, check out the Security and Freedom Ensured Act (SAFE) Act of 2005, sponsored by Representative Butch Otter (R-ID), and other positive, bi-partisan legislation in support of civil liberties. This isn’t over.”