New Madisonian Lisa Graves got a chance last week to reprise her starring role in Washington's long and torturous debate about the Patriot Act.

Before Graves took over as executive director of the Madison-based Center for Media and Democracy, she was deputy director of the Center for National Security Studies, where she focused on surveillance issues. Previously, the former deputy assistant attorney general and Senate Judiciary Committee staffer served as the senior counsel for legislative strategy at the American Civil Liberties Union.

During her time with the ACLU, Graves lobbied Congress to temper the Patriot Act and protect civil liberties. Rarely were her struggles more frustrating than in 2006, when a Republican Congress voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act, which she dubbed "deeply flawed." Last week, she was in Washington to address those deep flaws.

Testifying before the Judiciary Committee, Graves endorsed reasonable curbs on surveillance proposed by committee Chair Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. - especially secret orders for records or information held by third parties and secret roving wiretaps. "These reforms are an important down-payment toward restoring liberties that have been lost," Graves said.

For Graves, the bottom lines are historic and patriotic.

"One of the most important reasons our system of government is so successful, why our democracy has endured, is that we set limits on government power," she told the senators. "Elected leaders and government bureaucrats are bounded by the Constitution, laws passed by Congress, and the availability of review of actions taken by independent courts staffed with impartial judges. Checks on power help guarantee that we stay a free country, but these important checks have been greatly eroded."

That erosion insults not just Americans who risked their lives in the past to defend liberty, Graves explained, it insults those who are still taking those risks. To illustrate her point, she read from a statement by Capt. Ian Fishback, a U.S. soldier in Iraq who challenged abuses of prisoners and argued, "If we abandon our ideals in the face of adversity and aggression, then those ideals were never really in our possession. I would rather die fighting than give up even the smallest part of the idea that is America."

The key phrase in Graves' testimony was that reference to "an important down-payment toward restoring liberties that have been lost."

The changes proposed by Leahy and endorsed by Graves - along with those advanced by Patriot Act critic Russ Feingold - are only the beginning of the right response to Patriot Act abuses.

This is going to be a long debate. And Lisa Graves is going to be in the thick of it, arguing, correctly: "These issues may seem complicated on the surface, but they are really about a fundamental question in a democracy: How much information should the government be able to accumulate about a person, without any evidence of any wrongdoing. I would submit that the answer should be very little …"

John Nichols is associate editor of The Capital Times, Wisconsin's progressive daily online news source, where his column appears regularly. jnichols@madison.com

Login to post your comment. If you don't have an account, you may register for one.