Senator Russell Feingold

cast the lone dissenting vote against the recently passed Anti-Terrorism Bill.

On October 11, he spoke eloquently to consider the impact on civil liberties of some

 of the sweeping measures in the bill. On October 17, two of his staff

tested positive for anthrax bacteria.

I want to applaud Senator Feingold for his courageous stance.

OPENING STATEMENT OF U.S. SENATOR RUSS FEINGOLD

At the Debate of the Anti-Terrosim Bill

From the Senate Floor October 11, 2001.

ãThere is no doubt that if

we lived in a police state,

 it would be easier to catch terrorists.

If we lived in a country where the police

were allowed to search your home at any time

for any reason; if we lived in a country where

the government was entitled to open your mail,

 eavesdrop on your phone conversations,

or intercept your email communications;

if we lived in a country where people could be held

 in jail indefinitely based on what they write or think,

 or based on mere suspicion that they were up to no good,

the government would probably discover

 and arrest more terrorists, or would be terrorists,

just as it would find more lawbreakers generally.

 But that would not be a country in which

 we would want to live, and it would not be

a country for which we could, in good conscience,

 ask our young people to fight and die.

 In short, that country would not be

America.

 It is important to remember that the Constitution

was written in 1789 by men who had recently

won the Revolutionary War. They did not live

in comfortable and easy times of hypothetical enemies.

 They wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights

to protect individual liberties

 in times of war as well as in times of peace.

There have been periods in our nation's history

when civil liberties have taken a back seat to what

appeared at the time to be the legitimate exigencies of war.

 Our national consciousness still bears

 the stain and the scars of those events:

 The Alien and Sedition Acts,

    the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War,

the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II

 and the injustices perpetrated against German-Americans

and Italian-Americans, the blacklisting of

supposed communist sympathizers during the McCarthy era,

and the surveillance and harassment of antiwar protesters,

 including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during the Vietnam war.

We must not allow this piece of our past to become prologue.

Preserving our freedom

is the reason we are now engaged in a war on terrorism.

We will lose that war without a shot being fired

if we sacrifice the liberties of the American people

in the belief that by doing so we will stop the terrorists.

That is why this exercise of considering

the administration's proposed legislation

and fine tuning it to minimize the infringement

of civil liberties is so necessary and so important.

And this is a job that only the Congress can do.

We cannot simply rely on the Supreme Court

to protect us from laws that sacrifice our freedoms.

 We took an oath to support

 and defend the Constitution

of the United States.

 

In these difficult times that oath

becomes all the more significant.

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