When crisis powers become permanent

Will coronavirus permanently curtail civil liberties? Look at the Patriot Act.

Surveillance.

Americans were little familiar with the Patriot Act when then-President George W. Bush signed it into law in October of 2001, less than two months after the 9/11 attacks. (Most members of Congress never read the bill, either.) But subsequent years made increasingly clear the extent of its civil liberties abuses, and Americans' opposition rose accordingly. For civil libertarians, the Patriot Act has become an archetypal example of state abuse of a crisis to grab new powers it will never voluntarily concede.

The law is once again up for congressional renewal, this time while a new crisis, the coronavirus pandemic, is raising fresh fears of "temporary" emergency measures becoming permanent. The history of the Patriot Act is a window into why those fears are justified — and defensible without downplaying the risk of COVID-19 or dismissing the value of a robust public health response.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us
Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.