By Anthony Gregory

Published 05/25/11
It seems like only yesterday that a power-hungry president and administration, bent on starting preventive wars, shredding due process rights, stripping detainees of habeas corpus, and asserting executive supremacy in almost everything was trying to push the Patriot Act through an executive-friendly Senate and complacent House of Representatives. Members of his party were using procedural tricks to ram the bill through without the full deliberation it deserved. Leaders of the president's party marginalized those who stood up in protest. Of course, this first happened in October 2001, but it has been happening all over again, although now the president is a Democrat and not a Republican.

Congress is on the verge of extending the Patriot Act for another few years. Most Republicans have always supported doing so, although President Obama wanted a longer extension than even they proposed.

Obama wasn't always a big supporter of this Bush-era legislation that guts the Fourth Amendment among other quaint niceties. In 2003, he called the Act “shoddy and dangerousâ€