When a House Judiciary Subcommittee met on Sept. 22, 2009 to discuss reauthorizing certain provisions of the PATRIOT Act, John Conyers (D-MI) had a déjà-vu moment. During testimony to the subcommittee, the DOJ’s Deputy Assistant Attorney General advocated for the retention of the “important and effective” statutes. Conyers had heard this speech before. “You sound like a lot of people from DOJ that have come over here before, and yet you’ve only been there a few months,” Conyers said.

With the Senate Judiciary Committee already passing a bill  out of committee that Russ Feingold (D-WI) described as “disappointing” and many civil liberty advocates are calling “watered-down,” critics of the PATRIOT Act provision are looking to the House for reigning in the surveillance tools. “Now is the time to consider improving the Patriot Act, not just extending the provisions,” Conyers said. However, House members remember debating these provisions before and without the outcome they had wanted.

Conyers remarks were referring to the testimony given by prior administration’s officials who defended the PATRIOT Act provisions but did little to address the privacy concerns many lawmakers had raised during the bill’s original drafting process. According to the Washington Independent, “in 2001 [Republicans] had pushed aside a bipartisan version of the bill produced by the Judiciary Committee in favor of a version substantially revised and altered by the Rules Committee, led by then-chairman David Dreier (R-CA). Conyers has not forgotten about that either.  “Then-Chairman Dreier under Lord knows whose instructions, substituted that bill for another bill, that we at judiciary had never seen. So we come here today now to consider what we do with those parts that are expiring,” he said.

Conyers was not alone in remembering the replacement of the bipartisan bill. At the same House Judiciary Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Subcommittee hearing, Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), another House Judiciary Committee member, shared his memories from 2001. “We held in this committee five days of markup and achieved unanimity on the Patriot Act,” he said. “Then the bill just disappeared. And we had a new several hundred page bill revealed from the Rules Committee,” he added.

With the Dec. 31, 2009 deadline for the sun-setting PATRIOT Act provision, more hearings in the House are expected.