Reply #42: The Patriot Act wasn't just warrantless wiretapping. It was huge and really can't simply be repealed [View All]

[HamdenRice]

The PA was not just the awful illegal stuff Bush wanted. It was also a laundry list of stuff that the Justice Department had wanted to do with criminal procedure and terrorism going back to the Clinton administration. That's why it was submitted to quickly -- it had been on the shelf for years. It was many hundreds of pages long and the most offensive stuff was not the majority of what was in it.

Also the way federal law works, you don't just "repeal" an act like that. I realize this is complicated, but here goes: Federal law is in two forms. There are individual "Acts" like the PA -- those are bills passed by Congress. Then those individual acts get incorporated into the second form of federal law -- a complete set of federal laws called the "U.S. Code."

The PA is not just a single stand alone law. Most of it, like most federal Acts read something like this (I'm making this up just as an example):

"Title III, Section 4 of U.S. Code which currently reads, 'no person shall eat twinky while doing guard duty in Guantanamo,' shall be amended to read, 'no person shall without the permission of his commanding officer, eat a twinky while doing guard duty in Guantanamo."

Or worse a lot of it reads:

"In Title III, Section 5, subsection (c), the word 'shall' is replaced with the word, 'may.'"

So the U.S. Code's Justice Department sections were overhauled by the PA. It wasn't just a few rules that stand alone.

So the PA is never going to be "repealed" -- ever. That's simply not the way all the offensive sections of the PA can be removed from the U.S. Code. At this point, it's impossible. What would happen is that the new and improved Justice Department would either submit to Congress piecemeal amendments to the U.S. Code as it finds bad parts of the PA embedded in the Code, or it would submit yet another comprehensive overhaul of the Titles of the U.S. Code that govern the Justice Department, criminal procedure and terrorism.

When that happens, the DOJ may say to the public, that it has "repealed" the PA, or parts of the PA, but what it really will mean is that it has amended the US Code. Simple repeal -- a kind of do-over -- is not remotely feasible.