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The USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 is among the greatest laws ever passed by the legislature of the United States. Passed on October 24, 2001 by the House of Representatives, and the next day by the Senate, it was signed into law by President George W. Bush (fittingly, one of the greatest presidents in the history of the United States) on October 26. Though typically said to be passed in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11 that same year, the PATRIOT Act was something the government of the United States has needed for a long time. For too many years, the citizens of the United States had been running the government, rather than the other (proper) way around. The citizens and their ACLU lackeys, always bandying about liberal toy phrases like “Congressional inquiry”, “transparency in government”, “human rights”, and worst of all “judicial review”, were collectively running train all over the powers of the executive branch and its agencies. This situation was entirely unacceptable. When citizens control the government, all sorts of bad things can happen - particularly change.

The main problem plaguing the executive branch for the first 200 years or so of its existence was a particularly inconvenient piece of legislation, passed very early in the government’s existence, commonly referred to as the Constitution. This piece of blatantly partisan legislation supposedly enumerates what the executive, judicial, and legislative branches of the federal government of the United States are and are not allowed to do. There is an obvious fundamental problem with legislation such as this. Why is there something the government (especially the executive branch, which is the only part that matters) shouldn’t be allowed to do? Government is supposed to make law, not follow it. If government is supposed to follow law, then why doesn’t it pay taxes? Moreover, whenever the government is not allowed to do something, our enemies, especially our terrorist enemies, can exploit that restriction as a weakness. It would give the terrorists nothing less than pure joy to know that our own citizens are stopping the U.S. government from extracting necessary information from them. Vice-President Dick Cheney wisely notes that a “vital requirement in the war on terror is that we use whatever means are appropriate to try to find out the intentions of the enemy.” Every time we refuse to ‘torture’ an unlawful enemy combatant sitting in Guantanamo Bay, planning the next 9/11, a terrorist celebrates. If we insist on preserving their human rights, their human dignity, and the Geneva Convention which we signed, then they will win. If we do any less than condescend to precisely the measures they use against us, they will win. After all, when they can’t tell the difference between them and us, they won’t be able to attack us. It’s impeccable strategy. The PATRIOT Act gives the government these necessary tools to descend to the level of terrorists and dictators.

As mentioned before, the USA PATRIOT Act was introduced and passed in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In fact, the bill was introduced to the House of Representatives as a whole by F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. on October 23, passed the House the next day, the Senate the day after that, and signed into law by the 26th. The marvelous advantage to the fact that this bill was passed almost immediately after its proximate cause and quite immediately after its introduction is that there was neither the need nor the time for anyone actually to read it. As the misguided individuals who oppose Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism suggest, it is completely unreasonable to expect members of Congress to have staff read 342 pages of legal text overnight, so that they might form a reasonable, well-considered decision for voting the next day. What these critics also realize is that if the representatives actually read the bill, they might be tempted to object, instead of accumulating political brownie points. If they objected, they would be performing their Constitutionally-given duty to exercise due diligence - and as has been mentioned before, the Constitution is not something to which attention should be paid.

Always remember that satire > satyr, and that this work is licensed GFDL.

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The A Most Patriotic Act by New School Politics, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.