In my more than 60 years of reporting on Congress, I have always focused on truly independent members who, regardless of party, are faithful to the Constitution. For years, an especially insistent example has been Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon.
In “The Wyden Holdup: A Liberal’s Firm Stand,” Roll Call’s Tim Starks gets right to Wyden’s authentic Americanism as our individual liberties keep disappearing:
“The Oregon Democrat has become the Senate’s hardest line to cross on civil liberties issues in the national security arena …
“He has been among a small handful of Democratic senators seeking the Obama administration’s legal justification for the targeted killing of U.S. citizens suspected of being overseas terrorists, requests he said have gone unfulfilled” (Roll Call, Nov. 28).
And when the utterly misnamed Patriot Act was up for reauthorization in 2006, Wyden voted against it, along with nine other Democratic senators.
On the Senate floor last year, he attacked fellow members of Congress based on his investigation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which secretly puts much of our personal information into FBI databases:
“Many members of Congress have no idea how the law is being secretly interpreted by the executive branch, because that interpretation is classified. … Our constituents, of course, are totally in the dark. Members of the public have no access to the secret legal interpretations, so they have no idea what their government believes the law actually means” (“Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden vs. USA Patriot Act,” Statesman Journal (Salem, Ore.), May 27, 2011).
In May 2011, Wyden voted against the reauthorization of the bill.
This year, Wyden has gone even further in combatting the executive branch’s ever-expanding actions to keep the citizenry ignorant of what’s being done to disable the Constitution’s separation of powers. He was the only member of the Select Committee on Intelligence who voted against the president’s Intelligence Authorization Act because of “anti-leak provisions that would inhibit free speech and damage the news media’s ability to report on national security issues” (“Wyden Places Hold on Intelligence Authorization Bill,” wyden.senate.gov, Nov. 14).
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