The World Around You

Jacob Sullum at Reason.com has a nice commentary today on John Ashcroft and the USA PATRIOT act.

In a recent memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller, the attorney general said he had decided to correct misconceptions about Section 215, which authorizes the FBI to demand “any tangible thing” upon certifying to a secret court that it’s relevant to a terrorism investigation. “The number of times Section 215 has been used to date is zero,” Ashcroft said.

Well, doesn’t everyone who worried about the privacy implications of Section 215 look silly now? Sure, the FBI could use Section 215, with no meaningful judicial supervision, to secretly scrutinize the private records of innocent people. So far, though, it hasn’t.

It’s really a brilliant strategy. Don’t use the powers you’ve been given until they are permanent. The FBI has been able to restrain themselves on at least this point and thus argue that the powers aren’t really as dangerous as they have been made out to be. Pity the fools who grant this power to them permanently.

Both the Alabama House and Senate have recessed until Monday afternoon. Neither budget has passed its house of origin. The Senate appears to be much closer to a resolution on the Education Trust Fund budget than the House is on the General Fund budget. The hold up in the House is over a new version of the felon voting rights bill that was a compromise between House Democrats and the Governor’s Office. Many Republicans are opposed,

Riley in June killed a felons’ voting bill, angering many black lawmakers. The governor now supports a similar bill that is merged with his plan to expand the parole board.

“This is an overall reform of the pardons and paroles process,” said David Azbell, Riley’s press secretary.

But House Republicans said the current bill is worse than the one Riley killed in June. That bill would have required inmates to finish all of their sentences before regaining the right to vote.

The current one could apply to a felon who had been on parole for at least three years without a parole violation, but who still had years of parole left to serve. It also could apply to a felon convicted of robbery, stalking and other crimes as long as the crime involved no physical injury.

Rep. Jay Love, R-Montgomery, said the bill could help regain the right to vote for someone who held a pistol in a victim’s face during a robbery but didn’t pull the trigger. “I think that’s wrong,” he said.

Hammett asked the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Yvonne Kennedy, D-Mobile, to consider rewriting it to answer those objections.

Hammett also asked Riley to call House Republicans and ask them to stop delaying tactics on the bill.

This is going to test whether the rift between the Governor and his party is going to continue or whether the Governor’s leadership can prevail. Stay tuned.

Roy Moore’s attorneys want more time to prepare his defense before the Alabama Judicial Inquiry Commission. WSFA in Montgomery was reporting it was because he believes he will be exonerated by the Supreme Court and the charges from the Commission will be dropped. I found no evidence of this in print, so I won’t begin to discuss how ridiculous that argument is.

The Montgomery Advertiser reports,

Butts and Wilson said they want to postpone Moore’s defense because Moore has another team of attorneys who will be asking the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that the monument never should have been moved from the rotunda. Moore is facing a Sept. 29 deadline to file an appeal with the nation’s highest court.

Richard Cohen, general counsel for the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the plaintiffs that defeated Moore in the monument case in U.S. District Court, said Thursday he is not bothered by Moore’s request to delay state disciplinary proceedings.

“Moore is going to be able to continue to draw a paycheck, but he won’t be able to exercise his judicial powers because we think the Supreme Court will reject his request to review the case very quickly,” Cohen said.

“He can run, but he can’t hide,” Cohen said. “Eventually, I think he will be thrown out of office.”

He’s only delaying the inevitable. We wait patiently for the Supreme Court to close the book on Ol’ Roy.