Gene Healy: 'It can't happen here' just did

As a Senate candidate in 2003, Barack Obama called the PATRIOT Act “shoddy and dangerous.” Once safely in power, Obama started demonstrating his remarkable capacity for “growing in office” — expanding federal powers while piously moralizing about their potential abuse.

As a senator, he voted to reauthorize the surveillance law in 2006; and as president, signed another PATRIOT renewal from Europe via presidential autopen in 2011.