Russ Feingold and Dick Durbin have not made a single statement about why they allowed the Patriot Act to be extended last week without making a single peep of protest.

Republicans in Congress agreed to trials of suspected terrorists in the same court system, back when George W. Bush was President. Why won’t they agree to such trials now?

Overnight, news emerged that for years, the FBI grabbed Americans’ private telephone records without any search warrants, and justifying the seizures of these records by claiming that there were emergency terrorist threats that in fact never existed. Thousands of times, the FBI completely invented stories of terrorist plots to attack the United States so that [...]

Whenever a Democratic member of Congress is running for election, the most common line of attack by Republicans is to label that Representative or Senator as a “hardcore liberal,” or “one of the most liberal members of Congress.” In 2004, Senator John Kerry was unsurprisingly labeled as the “most liberal Senator” by the RNC, and [...]

How can anyone claim that the Boy Scouts of America has a keen respect for the basic rights of all people, when the organization discriminates against atheists and gays?

Amy Klobuchar has been one of the two U.S. Senators representing Minnesota for more than two years now, which is long enough for her to decide what kind of senator she’d like to be. Will she be the sort of senator who reads and understands legislation before she votes on it? Or will she be [...]

In the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Richard Durbin just offered an amendment to S. 1692, a bill reauthorizing Patriot Act surveillance powers. It would have only required that when national security letters (NSLs) are issued without constitutional warrants, they have to be limited to surveillance of those who are suspected terrorists, suspected spies, or people [...]

Senate Candidate Amy Klobuchar, 2006: “I would have advocated for changes to the Patriot Act, including provisions that protect libraries from government searches. With those changes, I would have voted for the renewal of the Patriot Act. In the future, however, I will advocate for additional protections for civil liberties”. Will Senator Amy Klobuchar keep [...]

This morning, a visitor to the website franken.senate.gov will encounter a canned message: “Sorry, the web page you have requested is experiencing technical difficulties.” Senator Al Franken is upgrading his web page from a canned, stand-in version (the one all new senators get) to a new, fully-formed and customized web page. As he warms to [...]

The Senate Judiciary Committee was faced with a crucial ethical test yesterday, and most of the committee failed. The test came during a special executive meeting to consider whether to reauthorize the infamous Patriot Act, a law that was passed in a rush, without any senator even reading the bill, granting the Executive Branch extreme [...]