ACLU Pans Closed Door Senate Panel

The ACLU is definitely feeling left out these days. First, Ft. Lauderdale refuses to let them demonstrate next to the OAS meeting in town and now this...

It seems that during the revision of the Patriot Act our esteemed Congressmen forgot to open the door to let the ACLU attorneys advise them on how it should be rewritten. An ACLU spokesperson had this to say about the snub from Capital Hill:

"When lawmakers seek to rewrite our Fourth Amendment rights, they should at least have the gumption to do so in public," said Lisa Graves, the ACLU's senior counsel for legislative strategy. "Americans have a reasonable expectation that their federal government will not gather records about their health, their wealth and the transactions of their daily life without probable cause of a crime and without a court order."

Either, the ACLU has decided that they are the defacto experts on the Patriot Act and have the opinion that it can't be written without their assistance or the ACLU has had a change of heart and has decided to mend their ways (for slamming lawsuits at the government left and right) by offering insight on how to avoid their suing in the future over the Act. (Now, that would be really big of them!)

My bet is on the former.