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Grassley Warns Ashcroft To Temper Patriot Act Fever NewsMax.comWith protests set to greet U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft when he arrives in Utah on Monday to speak to local law enforcement about the USA Patriot, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, is professing concern about Ashcroft’s announced position that the already controversial act should be dramatically expanded. Grassley, the head of the Finance Committee, says he “not going along with it at this present time,” noting that time enough for any modifications would come at the end of the first five-year review as envisioned under the act’s so-called “sunset provision.” Grassley says he and others had “doubts about the infringement upon the Constitutional rights of Americans” from the get-go. Theoretically, the entire act could lapse at the end of the first five-year period, but Grassley says he envisions a series of ongoing reviews at five-year intervals. In his continuing multi-city Patriot Act tour, which kicked off last week, Ashcroft is scheduled to appear at 10:50 a.m. in Utah before flying on to Boise, where he will speak at 1:55 p.m. at the Boise Depot events center near the Capitol. On Tuesday, the Attorney General will be in Las Vegas, Nev. At the beginning of the dozen-city tour, Ashcroft defended the act in a speech to the conservative American Enterprise Institute, saying, "We have used these tools to prevent terrorists from unleashing more death and destruction on our soil. All this has been done within the safeguards of our Constitution." The month-long nationwide campaign is on behalf of the act, which was adopted just weeks after the hijacked plane attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and gives the feds authority to tap phones, track Internet usage and cell phones, share intelligence information and detain immigrants. "The Patriot Act gives us the technological tools to anticipate, adapt and out-think our terrorist enemy. To abandon these tools would senselessly imperil American lives," Ashcroft said in his opening salvo. But advocacy groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union point to what they perceive as political motivation. "An attorney general going on the road, away from his official duties, to favorably spin policies violative of civil liberties is troubling, to say the least," said Laura Murphy, director of the ACLU's Washington office.
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