The Wall Street Journal waddles in with its own story on Senate Majority Leader Schumer (or possibly Senate Majority Leader Durbin), which includes this gem: "On policy, they are similar, though Mr. Durbin has been more outspoken on civil-liberties issues, particularly the Guantanamo Bay detention facility." So the Wall Street Journal thinks Guantanamo is a civil liberties issue rather than a national security issue? In fact Mr. Schumer has been quite outspoken over the years on civil liberties issues — particularly the Second Amendment right to bear arms, which he's been an outspoken opponent of.
I covered Mr. Schumer back in Washington in the mid-1990s when he was still in the House of Representatives and a member of the House Judiciary Committee. There he ran afoul of the criminal defense bar for sponsoring what eventually became known as the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. The civil liberties element of that law included restricting habeas corpus appeal rights, and expanding "the powers granted to the FBI to engage in multi- point (roving) wiretaps and emergency wiretaps without court orders, and to access an individual's hotel and vehicle and storage facility rental records." On the civil liberties issue of campaign speech, Mr. Schumer has been an ardent and outspoken supporter of limiting political speech by unconstitutional bans on issue ads and limits on campaign expenditures.
Mr. Schumer has been outspoken on civil liberties, for sure — he's just outspokenly against them.
