In your preparations for Halloween, you’re likely to have assembled a costume in which you could dress up as someone or something else, and move among people without anyone knowing who you are and what you’re really up to. For government spy agencies, however, this kind of activity isn’t just a bit of holiday fun. It’s a typical way of life.

Governments have probably sought the power to spy on people in their own countries for as long as they have been in existence. In a free nation, however, the government isn’t supposed to be able to spy on people unless it has evidence that supports a reasonable belief that a crime is being planned or committed. In the United States of America, the government is supposed to present this evidence to a court of law, which then approves the search and seizure of only relevant documents. The Fourth Amendment to our Constitution reads: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Unfortunately, most members of the U.S. Congress don’t seem to believe in the importance of the Fourth Amendment any more. A strong majority within the United States Senate supports S. 1692, the USA Patriot Act Sunset Extension Act, which aims to extend the worst abuses against Americans’ Fourth Amendment right to protection from unreasonable search and seizure. The government has been using the Patriot Act to spy on the private activities of Americans who aren’t suspected of connection to any crime at all. The law has used, in conjunction with the FISA Amendments Act, to grab huge amounts of personal information about Americans from commercial databases, library records, financial accounts and other sources – even when there isn’t any link to alleged terrorist conspiracies, which are what politicians keep saying the Patriot Act is supposed to protect us from.

Attempts to use S. 1692 to create meaningful reform of the Patriot Act have failed. Amendments were offered that would have required the government merely to show that its spying activities were related to foreign spying or terrorist conspiracies – but those amendments were voted down in the Senate Judiciary Committee. They were voted down by both Democrats and Republicans.

What’s more, Republican senators are now laying the groundwork for an effort to make S. 1692 even more draconian. Seven Republican members of the Senate Judiciary have written in protest in a minority report on S. 1692 that the legislation ought to allow even lower standards for government spying.

These senators (Jeff Sessions, Orrin Hatch, Charles Grassley, Jon Kyl, Lindsey Graham, John Cornyn and Tom Coburn) claim that S. 1692 places “too high a burden on the government’s ability to obtain business records”. The truth is that there’s no solid requirement in S. 1692 to restrict Big Brother government spying programs to criminal suspects, to people connected to terrorism, or to people connected to agents of foreign powers. Yet, these Senators claim that the legislation is too lax.

The Fourth Amendment clearly places the responsibility of proof on our government when it asks for the power to seize and search “papers”, including business records that contain information about Americans’ private lives. S. 1692 allows the government to get away with avoiding this responsibility, and yet Republican senators continue to push for even fewer constitutional protections.

The negotiations over S. 1692 show that Democrats cannot win a national security argument with Republicans by offering to extend the Patriot Act’s abusive provisions. The Republicans merely respond by shifting their tactics, demanding additional sacrifices of constitutional rights.

Those of us who still believe that the promises of the Constitution should be kept cannot win the debate in increments, begging for scraps of portions of our rights. Republican politicians interpret these maneuvers as signs of weakness. S. 1692 is an unsuccessful appeasement that needs to be defeated so that the worst parts of the Patriot Act can expire, as they were originally intended to do.

There can be no meaningful reform of Patriot Act. The politically effective way to bring back the constitutional rights that have been eroded under the Patriot Act is to campaign against the Patriot Act as a whole.