House overwhelmingly votes for overhauling NSA phone metadata bulk collection program

“I don’t know if that can get 60 over here,” Senator John Thune (R-South Dakota), the third-ranking Republican in the Senate, told the Guardian on Wednesday, referring to the number of votes necessary to re-authorize the Patriot Act’s Section 215. He added that there may be a process that will allow for votes on “several different proposals.”

Senate majority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), has introduced legislation with Senator Richard Burr (R-North Carolina), who chairs the Senate intelligence committee, to extend the existing language of the Patriot Act through 2020. A spokesman for McConnell told the Guardian that the plan in the Senate is still to bring up that bill, despite bipartisan opposition to it, and open the floor to amendments.

“I believe if we allow these provisions to expire, our homeland security will be at a much greater risk,” Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) said. “It’s not enough to say to the American people, ‘Well, we will deploy all of the tools available to law enforcement to prosecute the person that murders innocent people.’ We need to keep the commitment to protect them from that innocent slaughter in the first place, and the only way we do that is by using legitimate tools of intelligence, like this program.”

Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), who has proposed several reforms to the FISA court, said that the House vote makes McConnell’s position “untenable.”

“He’s really in a box,” Blumenthal said on Wednesday. “I don’t know what his strategy is. I think he should sit down with supporters of the USA Freedom Act and reach a compromise that preserves constitutional rights and at the same time protects security.”

In the House, most Republicans, including hawks on the intelligence committee, said they were convinced that the USA Freedom Act represented the best chance to preserve more targeted NSA surveillance powers.

“America’s liberty and America’s security can coexist,” said judiciary chair Bob Goodlatte (R-Virginia) during the floor debate before Wednesday’s vote. “They are not mutually exclusive.”

Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin), one of the authors of the original Patriot Act and lead sponsor of the USA Freedom Act reforms, argued they were the best possible compromise between the wishes of “national security hawks and civil libertarians” and accused the bill’s opponents of “fear-mongering.”

“I don’t fault my colleagues who wish this bill went further to protect our civil liberties. For years the government has violated the privacy of innocent Americans, and I share your anger,” he said. “But letting Section 215 and other surveillance authorities expire would not only threaten our national security, it would also mean less privacy protections.”

The USA Freedom Act last passed the House by 303 votes to 121 in May 2014, and members of the congressional staff who worked on re-writing the bill say these revisions have made the measure acceptable enough to security hawks in the Senate.

“All I know is, these programs expire at the end of this month. They are critically important to keep Americans safe,” Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said. “The House is going to act, and I would hope the Senate would act soon as well.”

“With the passage of this bill, the House will have done its part to enact historic and sweeping reforms,” said Representative John Conyers (d-Michigan), the leading Democrat behind the bill. “Today we have a rare opportunity to restore a measure of restraint to surveillance programs that have simply gone too far.”

Representative Will Hurd (R-Tex.), a former CIA officer, said the bill “strikes the right balance between privacy and security.”

“I’ve seen firsthand the value these programs bring,” he said, “but I also know if Americans don’t feel they can trust their own government, we’re losing the battle right here at home.”

“This is a strong bill and should advance with such an overwhelming majority that it compels the Senate to act,” said Representative Adam Schiff (D-California), the ranking Democrat of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Leading civil liberties groups and privacy advocates are not convinced. The ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation withdrew their support for a bill because, they say, the reforms it requires do not go far enough to fix the underlying problem.

These opponents of the USA Freedom Act were encouraged last week by a federal appeals court’s ruling last week which found that NSA’s bulk collection programs exceeded what was authorized by Section 215. These critics say they would prefer the have Section 215 expire rather than see efforts to see it mended. They note that most of the bulk NSA surveillance, especially outside the United States, will be left untouched by the USA Freedom Act.

“As a result of the Second Circuit decision, the USA Freedom Act’s modest changes appear even smaller compared to the now judicially recognized problems with the mass collection of Americans’ records,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s David Greene and Mark Jaycox wrote in a Tuesday op-ed.

Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), who sits on the intelligence committee and has long criticized the mass surveillance, said yesterday that he would block any effort “to just re-up the Patriot Act without reforms and the phone records collection program … just as it is.”

“I consider it a federal human relations database,” Wyden said. “Millions and millions of phone records — when people call, often where they call from, who they call — is a lot of information.”

The Washington Post notes that the Republican caucus in the Senate is deeply divided.

Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah), a leading Republican backer of surveillance revisions, spoke on the Senate floor Tuesday calling for adoption of the House bill, which is rooted in bipartisan negotiations among members of the House and Senate.

“This is a compromise, an important compromise that will enable us to protect Americans’ privacy while giving the government the tools it needs to keep us safe,” Lee said. “It is a bill, I think, we should take up and pass as soon as they have voted.”

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) said the prominent Republican critics of bulk surveillance — who include Lee and Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), who has threatened to filibuster an extension of current law – do not represent the views of most Senate Republicans. “They’re the outliers here,” he said.

“I am trying to find a balance between protecting national security and individual liberty, which is one of the things I ran on,” said Senator David Perdue (R-Georgia). “This is not as black and white as everyone seems to think, and I’m trying to be very thoughtful with my vote on this.”