If you’ve been following the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act and kept saying to yourself, “There’s just no way this is going to move,” then think again. It now has bipartisan support in the Senate, in addition to the House.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California, introduced the bill in the Senate with Sen. James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma. Inhofe has the pushed the bill in the past, and it has always failed. But industry groups have ratcheted up their lobbying, and “eco-terrorism” has been a hot topic in the press with “Operation Backfire” and the SHAC 7 conviction.
The good news is that the bill probably won’t move this year. Congress will cut out in about a month for campaigning.
The bad news– and there’s plenty of it– is that the bill is just as sweeping as the House bill. For more information on that, see my Congressional testimony.
Some civil liberties advocates and Hill staffers concerned about this “eco-terrorism” scare-mongering have told me that they if they can stall the bill, a power change in Congress could knock it out. First of all, that’s not a strategy for fighting what is perhaps the most troubling “terrorism” legislation second to the Patriot Act: non-action isn’t an option here. And second, that’s just not grounded in reality. Feinstein may have more Republican admirers than Democrats, put she still has plenty of pull in the party, and she’s not the only D that has gotten behind this bill out of fear of looking soft on “terrorism.”