The Patriot Act May Be Dead ForeverThe most controversial elements of the spying bill may never be coming back, lawmakers from both parties tell The Daily Beast. Here’s why.Barring any last-minute compromises, powerful government surveillance authorities under the Patriot Act will expire at the stroke of midnight Monday. And they may never return.
This week, senators have been negotiating over whether to pass a House bill that would renew and tweak existing provisions in the long-controversial law, rather than let them “sunset” on June 1. But if the sunset comes and the provisions are off the books, lawmakers in both chambers would be facing a vote to reinstate controversial surveillance authorities, which is an entirely different political calculation.
Lawmakers may be unwilling to vote affirmatively for surveillance powers that many of them already dislike and have tried to rein in. “I think it is a real risk that if the provisions do expire, they would be more difficult to reinstate than to reform,” Representative Adam Schiff, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told The Daily Beast.
Schiff supports the USA Freedom Act, which overwhelmingly passed the House but failed to muster enough votes in a midnight Senate session last Saturday. The bill would end the NSA’s collection of phone records in bulk, but leave intact other surveillance tools that, while not broadly popular, are less controversial.
Schiff said it was easier to get lawmakers to support the Freedom Act with its changes to existing law than it would be to vote to re-enact law that had gone away.
Senator Mike Lee, who also supports the Freedom Act, shared that sentiment. “There were members who voted for the USA Freedom Act who would feel differently about reinstating those provisions” once they’ve lapsed, Lee told The Daily Beast. Lee said he was talking to colleagues this week to try to persuade them to support the bill before the clock runs out.
The political stakes for Congress are high, and novel. Asking members to reinstate the provisions would be akin to asking them to cast a new vote in favor of the Patriot Act, and that’s something that two-thirds of House members have never done in their legislative careers, said Harley Geiger, the advocacy director and senior counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology. “If the provisions sunset, we enter uncharted waters, and I don’t really know what happens,” Geiger told The Daily Beast.
While lawmakers could once be counted on to reliably reauthorize the Patriot Act—and accuse opponents of risking national security if they failed to do so—leaks by Edward Snowden about spying operations have eroded the law’s support. In the House, USA Freedom was pitched as a compromise that would suspend the phone records program while leaving intact other measures that intelligence agencies say they need. The bill has enjoyed support among some privacy and civil liberties advocates.
The Senate will return on Sunday to make one last try to pass it. But if they fail, there’s no obvious way forward in either chamber. “The only way out of this box,” Schiff said, was for the Senate to pass the House bill.
“There were members who voted for the USA Freedom Act who would feel differently about reinstating those provisions” once they’ve lapsed, the senator said.
Three major Patriot provisions are on the chopping block: so-called roving wiretaps, which let the government monitor one person’s multiple electronic devices; the “lone-wolf” provision, which allows surveillance of someone who’s not connected to a known terrorist group; and Section 215, which, among other things, the government uses to collect the records of all landline phone calls in the United States.
House lawmakers say they’re in no mood to bail the Senate out if it once again can’t muster the votes needed to head off a possible filibuster by surveillance opponents, most notably Senator Rand Paul and his allies, including Ted Cruz. Both men are running for president.
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