Jason Rylander has been writing very worthy pieces criticizing the Bush Administration's anti-terror proposals as unnecessary invasions of our privacy rights. He mentions he received an email from law professor Jonathan Adler, stating:

"As for hypocrisy on the Right, just remember that the version of the USA Patriot Act that emerged from the "conservatives" in the House was less intrusive than that which emerged from Daschle's "liberal" Senate."

Jason says this is a tough criticism to address, "because on the face of it, Adler is correct."

We agree that Professor Adler is correct. The Democrats have not been strong on civil and constitutional rights. The Clinton administration, which we admire for other accomplishments, was terrible in these areas.

We wrote an article about this in 1996 titled Partisan Politics vs. the Bill of Rights, originally published in the Champion, the magazine of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. Many of the points we made in the article seem just as valid to us today. Here's a piece of the article:

Congress has once again placed itself on a collision course with the Bill of Rights. With the presidential and congressional elections just two months away, our politicians are once more trying to demonstrate their tough stance on crime and concern for our security by introducing and promising swift passage of legislation that diminishes our privacy rights and provides even greater powers to federal law enforcement agencies.

Using the tragedies of TWA Flight 800 and the Olympic bombing in Atlanta to instill fear of terrorism in the heart of every American, our politicians are promising to make us safe and secure by giving the FBI the power to wiretap more of us with less judicial scrutiny, to access our personal and financial records with no judicial oversight, and to seize our assets by classifying us as "terrorists" based upon our personal and political beliefs.

President Clinton and the Democrats are behind this latest assault on our privacy rights. On the eve of the first anniversary of the Oklahoma bombing in April, 1996, Congress passed the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. The Democrats were very disappointed, however, because the bill passed without proposed expansions of wiretapping authority. In May 1996, Reps. Charles Schumer (D-NY) and John Conyers (D-MI) introduced H.R. 3409 "to combat domestic terrorism." The bill, titled the "Effective Anti-Terrorism Tools for Law Enforcement Act of 1996," would expand the powers granted to the FBI to engage in multi- point (roving) wiretaps and emergency wiretaps without court orders, and to access an individual's hotel and vehicle and storage facility rental records. It also relaxed the requirements for obtaining pen register and trap and trace orders in foreign intelligence investigations.

Particularly when it comes to electronic surveillance, we're much more aligned with the conservative Republicans and libertarians than we are with the Democrats. Bush, unfortunately, is a centrist on many issues and not much different than the current crop of democrats. This is another reason we advise the Democrats to start moving left and get out of center field. Show the country you care about individual liberties, that there is a difference between the two parties, and give the voters a real choice next time. The only thing you have to lose is your extinction as a voice and powerful force in American politics.