Comment by rs186
If the law has expired, how do they "expand" the law? I am confused. Did they refer to the wrong one?
If the law has expired, how do they "expand" the law? I am confused. Did they refer to the wrong one?
"Acts" as they are passed by Congress are usually a huge collection of additions/deletions/modifications to existing law. And those changes can be unrelated and scattered across hundreds and hundreds of sections of existing statutes, each of which can have their own sunset clauses. So some of the things included in "The Patriot Act" expired, but parts are still active.
The patriot act is not really “a law” in the sense of being a concrete series of statements you can point to in today’s US Code. It’s more like a patch to a codebase. At the time it was passed it (like any statutory act of Congress) created and amended dozens of sections of the US code. Some of those provisions had expiration dates which have lapsed, but not all, and (apparently) not the sections this article discusses dealing with financial crimes.