Update: Amber Bill Package passed the House. It may or may not make it through the Senate: <The two bills will have to be reconciled by House and Senate negotiators before any version can be sent to the president. Last year, the Senate refused to consider the House bill, and the House refused to consider the Senate bill.

Democrats argued that the House-passed bill likely will meet the same fate in the Senate as last year, because its additional child protection measures face much more resistance in the Senate.

"Here we are again, facing the same misguided strategies, and this time again with even more reason for the Senate to reject the bill which the Amber Alert bill is buried in," said Rep. Robert Scott, D-Va."

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The Democrats in the House yesterday failed to pass a stand-alone Amber Alert bill.

The Republicans want the Amber Alert bill to be part of a larger anti-crime package--one with increased criminal penalties and expanded wiretap powers. The Republican measure is expected to pass the House today, but may run into problems in the Senate due to the anti-crime provisions. The Senate had already passed a stand-alone Amber Alert bill.

40 states already have Amber Alert systems in place. The federal law would create a national coordinator for the system in the Justice Department and provide matching grants to states for operating the networks. The New York Times warns that Congress should move slowly on the Amber Alert bill.

Our view, as we have expressed in the comments section to this post, is that we should leave Amber Alerts to the states, and put the money where it can save more lives.

Update: The House is poised to approve the Republican bill with anti-crime provisions.

Bill Frist is up to his old tricks with the Eli Lilly vaccine legislation. Wampum Blog pleads for you to help.

Senator Bill Frist, with the help of Judd Gregg (R-NH), is resubmitting the Eli Lilly Thimerosal provison, with additional devastating changes to the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program and to the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. Markup is scheduled for today. Frist thinks he may have the votes.

Call these committee members using toll-free Congressional switchboard at 1-800-839-5276:
Gregg, Judd (R - NH)
Frist, William (R - TN)
Enzi, Mike (R - WY)
Alexander, Lamar (R-TN)
Bond, Christopher (R - MO)
DeWine, Mike (R - OH)
Roberts, Pat (R - KS)
Sessions, Jeff (R - AL)
Ensign, John (R - NV)
Graham, Lindsey - (R - SC)
Warner, John (R - VA)

Ranking Members
Kennedy, Edward (D-MA)
Edwards, John (D - NC)
Dodd, Christopher (D - CT)
Harkin, Tom (D - IA)
Mikulski, Barbara (D - MD)
Jeffords, James (I - VT)
Bingaman, Jeff (D - NM)
Murray, Patty (D - WA)
Reed, Jack (D - RI)
Clinton, Hillary (D - NY)

Please, call and fax the following Senators and ask that they not agree to this horrible legislation which will essentially gut the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, not only for children with mercury-induced neurological disorders, but possibly for ANY vaccine-injured child (and there have in fact been thousands of claims previously settled.)

Wampum's got all the details over there, so go visit.

The New York Times shares our concerns, expressed in the comments section to this post, over pending federal efforts to pass a bill expanding Amber Alerts:

...If used correctly, such systems seem to be useful tools for law enforcement. But given the very few cases of child abduction and the potential for vigilantism, the systems must be designed to ensure that they do more good than harm.

There is nothing wrong with coordinating information about missing children. But if done badly, there is the potential of promoting vigilantism by seeming to invite help in apprehending a suspected abductor. Also, if the wrong information is put out — an incorrect license plate or a bad physical description — posses of armed citizens could descend on innocent people, with tragic results.

The Senate passed legislation earlier this year to establish a nationwide Amber Alert network and to provide federal grants for, among other things, highway notifications. On a pure cost-benefit basis, the attention and financing do not really seem warranted. There are only about 100 abductions by strangers a year, making it a lesser threat to children than choking or bicycle accidents.

If Amber Alerts are going to become more widespread, law enforcement must be careful to screen out all but the most well-verified cases and to present the information in a way that encourages members of the public to watch for missing children without taking the law into their own hands.

The ACLU has posted a new and shorter version of its original 19 page analysis of Patriot Act II, describing How “Patriot Act 2” Would Further Erode the Basic Checks on Government Power That Keep America Safe and Free.

Instapundit.com:

JUST BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON doesn't mean that there aren't idiocies elsewhere. Here's a Texas Republican Congressman who wants to jail college kids for file-trading.

The bill is sponsored by Rep. John Carter of Texas, a former very strict Texas Judge. He's one of the Congressman we had a meeting scheduled with yesterday on the Innocence Protection Act, but he handed us off to an aide who had never heard of the bill. We tried to educate the aide for about 15 minutes, then left.

Medical Marijuana Patients won a partial victory in the Maryland House today.

The Marijuana Policy Project also reports that on March 12, a bill passed the State Senate in Oklahoma which would impose a $500 fine rather than jail time for up to 17 ounces of marijuana, repeal some mandatory minimum sentences, and authorize community service and treatment instead of jail for some offenders. It is now pending in a House committee.

I'll be at Congress today with a group of criminal defense lawyers, visiting individual Congresspersons at their various offices. We start at the Longworth Office Building where we will meet and break into groups of two, go off to our meetings, trying to convince certain Republican members of the House to support the Innocence Protection Act.

I'll be back later to let you know what it was like being in the House office buildings the day war is supposed to break out. In fact, if the blizzard doesn't stop raging in Denver so that planes can fly in, I may be blogging all night from the airport. I hope not. I'm beginning to understand what a stateless person feels like -- Washington is about the last place I want to be today but I can't go home and have no place else to go.

Update: The bill to ban partial birth abortions passed. Daily Kos has the numbers and analysis.

Lisa English of RuminateThis brings us up to date on the vote in Congress today on abortion:

The fundamentalist legislators of America - nearly all of them men - will decide today on whether this nation's women will be allowed to end pregnancies, that if carried to term poses a "grievous threat" to the health and life of the mother. The men, all bought and paid for by religious extremism, believe that a woman's life is not nearly as worthy as that of a fetus. We're not talking about the wholesale slaughter of near-term babies. We're talking about a rare situation...where two doctors, unrelated to abortion, come together and agree that the pregnancy should end for medical reason. The extremists, who have no problem executing children and men on death row, have problems terminating pregnancies where the mother's health is in trouble. It's murder, they say. God told them so.

Lisa's right, we are headed down a dangerous path here....go read her whole post.

ABC News reports on the right and left joining together to fight Ashcroft and Patriot Act II

The opposite ends of the political spectrum are coming together over the war on terror, but not in the way Attorney General John Ashcroft may have wanted.

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Via Smythe's World, Scott Hatch, who is the son of Senator Orin Hatch, is one of the principal lobbyists for the manufacturers of ephedra, at a time when the Utah Senator is not only the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman but has also played a leading role in sponsoring legislation to make ephedra and other dietary supplements free from regulatory oversight.

Hmm....doesn't sound kosher to us either, comments?

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The Los Angeles Times Wednesday reports that

"the Justice Department has stepped up use of a secretive process that enables the attorney general to personally authorize electronic surveillance and physical searches of suspected terrorists, spies and other national-security threats without immediate court oversight. Attorney General John Ashcroft told the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday that he had authorized more than 170 such "emergency" searches since the Sept. 11 attacks-- more than triple the 47 emergency searches that have been authorized by other attorneys general in the last 20 years.

Ashcroft has been accomplishing this by using FISA (The Foreign Intelligence Security Act of 1978) to get the warrants, instead of going through the federal criminal justice system--where a federal judge must find probable cause of criminal activity for a warrant. Aside from the number of secret wiretap and search applications, Ashcroft is pushing the limits of the FISA statute in other ways.

Since Sept. 11, officials have seized on a provision that allows them to launch emergency searches signed only by the attorney general. The department must still convince the FISA court that the search is justified-- but officials have 72 hours from the time the search is launched, and such requests are almost always granted.

We disagree that the Justice Department must convince the FISA Court that the search is justified. All they have to do is submit an application and make the allegation that one of the purposes for which the warrant is sought is intelligence gathering and that it is non-trivial. As Reporter Vanessa Blum wrote in this Legal Times article

In a scathing opinion made public Aug. 22, the FISA court ... ruling points to more than 70 cases in the late 1990s in which FISA judges were misled about coordination between law enforcement and intelligence agents. ...The court has approved approximately 13,000 applications since its inception. And just once, in 1997, the government withdrew a request that the court had found deficient. "

Ashcroft has claimed he has new powers as a result of changes in the Patriot Act, which changes he interprets as providing that applications for FISA surveillance warrants can have criminal investigative rather than intelligence gathering purposes as their principal goal. This interpretation is contrary to the intent of Congress in passing the Patriot Act as we have previously argued in-depth here. More from Reporter Vanessa Blum :

The ACLU is on top of things, as always. Click here to learn what the proposed Patriot Act sequel contains, and to send a fax to Congress sharing your opinions on it.

If there was ever a group that deserves a donation for its yeoman work the past year and a half, it's the ACLU. Give what you can.