Dave Weigel and Dahlia Lithwick write about the search for a new champion of civil liberties in the Senate now that Russ Feingold is gone, with Al Franken and Sheldon Whitehouse emerging as front-runners:
Like Franken, however, Whitehouse ultimately voted to allow warrantless wiretapping. And neither of the would-be champions has convinced the civil liberties community that he's as willing to engage in a throwdown as Feingold was.
"I think Whitehouse has a lot of potential," says Nat Hentoff, the civil libertarian critic who's now a policy scholar at Cato. "I think Al Franken is Al Franken. He's good at promoting himself. Feingold has been the only Democrat who's told the truth of what's been happening, that Obama has been asking the Congress not to reform the warrantless wiretapping that Bush put in place."
I think this is somewhat unfair criticism of Franken from Hentoff -- Franken has emerged as probably the most articulate voice of progressive legal philosophy in the Senate, even if his civil-liberties record is somewhat tarnished. Hentoff's statement may be a reference to Franken's rather dramatic show of reading the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution to Assistant Attorney General David Kris before ultimately voting PATRIOT Act renewal out of committee with all the other well-behaved Democrats.
Civil-libertarian groups would be foolish to alienate someone like Rand Paul, who might be willing to indulge his more libertarian views now that he doesn't need the blessing of the Cheney wing of the party to win an election. But the truth is that there isn't anyone left in the Senate with feet big enough to fill Feingold's shoes.
