He's not coming to the issue unaffected by current events: The issue of terrorism hit Feingold directly last week, after anthrax was sent to the Hart Office Building of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D. Feingold has the office next door; subsequent testing revealed that three of Feingold's staffers tested positive for anthrax exposure. Though this number was later lowered to two, almost 30 members of Feingold's staff are taking the antibiotic Cipro as a precaution.
But that didn't change his opinion. "There is no doubt that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorists," Feingold recently said on the Senate floor. "But that probably would not be a country in which we would want to live. And that would not be a country for which we could, in good conscience, ask our young people to fight and die. In short, that would not be America."
When it's suggested that the American people seem willing to give up some civil liberties in the name of enhanced security, Feingold says he doesn't think the American people realize the extent of the infringement. "I'm perfectly happy to be checked more carefully when I fly, even though I'm a U.S. senator, and I understand that I can't stand up during the last half-hour of my flights into National Airport, but that's not what we're talking about," he says. "That's not civil liberties, that's convenience."
The enhanced powers the U.S. government has as of Friday morning are much more serious, he says, permitting law enforcement officials to engage in "fishing expeditions" where they'll be privy to private information -- wiretaps, phone and e-mail information, secret search warrants, medical and business records -- with little justification.
"I don't believe for a minute people would be willing to give up these liberties if they knew exactly what was going on," Feingold says. "I don't think if you conducted a poll and asked, Do you believe that the FBI should be able to come into and do a 'sneak and peak' search of your house without letting you know? that the majority of Americans would say yes."
A spokesman for Sen. Leahy says that Leahy shares many of Feingold's concerns but that the bill is the best the Democrats could negotiate and in the end a net positive for the country's new cause.
"Senator Feingold is advocating positions Senator Leahy was taking during negotiations, so obviously he's sympathetic with Senator Feingold's point of view," says Leahy spokesman David Carle, who points out that Attorney General John Ashcroft criticized Leahy for foot-dragging on the bill. "The checks and balances added weren't in the administration's original proposal. If he had written the bill himself, he would have added more. But this is the legislative process where negotiations are involved."
The original Bush administration proposal, for instance, would have allowed use by federal agencies of information obtained by foreign law enforcement through wiretaps and other procedures that would be illegal in this country. Leahy was able to get that removed.
According to a Senate source familiar with the negotiations, Democratic negotiators like Leahy and Sen. Paul Sarbanes, D-Md., chairman of the Banking Committee, also added provisions against money laundering that the Bush administration would tout in public but never support in private. Leahy and Rep. Dick Armey, R-Texas, the House Majority Leader, added a provision that will revoke some of the government's new surveillance powers in 2005, unless they are expressly renewed.
But Feingold says that he's disappointed with more than just the final bill. When it was first debated on the Senate floor Oct. 11, Feingold -- chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on the Constitution -- introduced three amendments that would have made the bill more constitutionally palatable, he says. One of them, for example, would have mandated that while law enforcement could have monitored a host of pay phones frequented by a suspect, officials could only actually listen in on conversations if the suspect was participating.
But Daschle -- concerned that Feingold's amendments would weaken the bipartisan support for the bill and exacerbate the perception that Senate Democrats were being pokey -- told his caucus to kill them. (Daschle was also a bit on the defensive as only a few days before, Bush had publicly scolded members of Congress for allegedly leaking sensitive information.)
"There is no question, all 100 of us could go through this bill with a fine-tooth comb and pinpoint those things which we could improve," Daschle said. "We have come up with what I would view as a delicate but -- yes -- successful compromise. We have a job to do. The clock is ticking."
Feingold, who was already upset that the anti-terrorism bill didn't go through the normal Judiciary Committee process, was stunned. He thought that matters were being too rushed, that their decisions were not being amply debated. His subcommittee, he would later argue, "held the only hearing of substance on this issue. Nobody took these problems seriously."
The bill passed that day 96-1. Thursday's vote was on the final version, after it had been reconciled with the House version in conference committee.