Patriot Act divides Bush loyalists

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Rarely has an issue so deeply divided Republicans as the USA Patriot Act, which is pitting conservatives critical of the law against President Bush's call to reauthorize it in an unusual election year intraparty debate.

The issue puts several Republicans in the peculiar position of defending Sen. John Kerry, the likely Democratic presidential nominee, who opposes parts of the act as threats to constitutional protections.

"Kerry isn't a supporter of terrorism any more than I am, just because we both raised some questions about whether some things in the Patriot Act go too far," said former Rep. Bob Barr, a Georgia Republican who thinks aspects of the law violate personal privacy.

"The Fourth Amendment is a nuisance to the administration, but the amendment protects citizens and legal immigrants from the government's monitoring them whenever it wants, without good cause -- and if that happens, it's the end of personal liberty," Mr. Barr said.

At a recent private gathering, former Reagan administration Attorney General Edwin I. Meese III, long a hero to many in his party, defended the act against a battery of critics that included such conservative stalwarts as former Virginia Gov. James S. Gilmore III, Mr. Barr and American Conservative Union Chairman David A. Keene.

Mr. Meese heatedly challenged them to come up with a single example of unlawful search and seizure and invasion of privacy by the government under the act.

"I don't care if there were no examples so far," Mr. Barr is said to have countered. "We can't say we'll let government have these unconstitutional powers in the Patriot Act because they will never use them. Besides, who knows how many times the government has used them? They're secret searches."

Some Republican critics, even though they are Bush loyalists, say that the Patriot Act was coined with the purpose of making it easy to label any critic of the act unpatriotic or soft on terrorism. They say Bush supporters plan to use that tactic against Mr. Kerry.

"Conservatives have always been split on the competing values of national security, on the one hand, and individual liberty and the mistrust of big government, on the other," Mr. Keene said.