By allowing the Republican leadership to ramrod through a renewal of the overreaching Patriot Act with only minor reconsiderations, silencing dissent from both sides of the aisle, Thursday's House vote actually makes Americans just a little less free.

At least two of the three representatives from Utah, Democrat Jim Matheson and Republican Rob Bishop, had the guts to vote against the bill. They tried to expand the reach of freedom rather than buy, as Rep. Chris Cannon sadly did, the argument that sticking by the principles that make America what it is somehow makes us more vulnerable to attack.

The Patriot Act, rushed into law while the attacks of 9/11 were still ringing in our ears, expanded the power of federal law enforcement agencies to search for terrorists and potential terrorists under many more rugs, with a lot less judicial oversight, than they had had before. But the evidence that this law, or any other action by any person whose name you can print without being arrested, has actually made us safer consists of nothing more than the word of the officials who wanted the law renewed.

It's not that most of us will ever be the target of one of the warrantless, because-I-said-so searches of our library records or cell-phone conversations - the most controversial parts of the law that will, under the House version, at least come back for reconsideration in 10 years.

It is that all of us are being told that it is none of our business whether or not we have been the targets of such searches, and that if we won't agree to no-tell searches authorized by secret courts and reported to Congress without independent corroboration, then we must be in league with the terrorists.

A much more reasonable version of Patriot Act renewal has come from the Senate Judiciary Committee, a version that requires more judicial oversight of investigators' tactics and brings some of the more controversial aspects of the bill back for congressional review in four years, rather than the House's 10.

Two years would be better. If these provisions are really so necessary, then it should be a simple matter to have them reauthorized by every incoming Congress.