Now that it’s been proven that the National Security Agency (NSA) is spying on the American people it’s time for Rand Paul to take the stage and perform some political grandstanding. Low and behold, as if on queue, he has come forward with a piece of legislation that he claims will restore Fourth Amendment protections:
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Sen. Rand Paul today announced he will introduce the Fourth Amendment Restoration Act of 2013, which ensures the Constitutional protections of the Fourth Amendment are not violated by any government entity.
“The revelation that the NSA has secretly seized the call records of millions of Americans, without probable cause, represents an outrageous abuse of power and a violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. I have long argued that Congress must do more to restrict the Executive’s expansive law enforcement powers to seize private records of law-abiding Americans that are held by a third-party,” Sen. Paul said. “When the Senate rushed through a last-minute extension of the FISA Amendments Act late last year, I insisted on a vote on my amendment (SA 3436) to require stronger protections on business records and prohibiting the kind of data-mining this case has revealed. Just last month, I introduced S.1037, the Fourth Amendment Preservation and Protection Act, which would provide exactly the kind of protections that, if enacted, could have prevented these abuses and stopped these increasingly frequent violations of every American’s constitutional rights.
Let me get this straight. The federal government violated the Fourth Amendment by spying on the American people and Rand solution is to make that act more illegal? I’m sure the NSA will stop spying on us when it becomes doubleplusillegal! Hell, making spying illegaler will work better than repealing the PATRIOT Act or FISA!
This legislation is likely to be a worthless as his legislation to protect Americans from being executed by drones, which included an exception so vague that it could be applied to anybody.
Rand is turning out to be a master of exploiting crises for political gain and that fact should worry everybody.