If you followed Sunday night’s stalled Senate effort to reauthorize the Patriot Act, and the standoff over the reform-oriented USA Freedom Act, you may not even be sure which side you’re on. It’s not your fault.
The standoff seemed more about politics than substance, yet disagreement over the substance didn’t break along clean political lines. By the time the Senate passed the Freedom Act on Tuesday and President Barack Obama signed it into law Tuesday night, it was tough to even decipher the motivations of key players.
Start with President Obama. As a senator from Illinois and a Democratic presidential candidate, he had effectively appealed to disillusioned civil libertarians by disparaging President George W. Bush’s post-9/11 intelligence programs.
Yet as president, Obama has presided over a growth in secret surveillance, even as public indignation over it has swelled with disclosures leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. That includes accessing the servers of Internet companies for communications between Americans and people abroad, and collecting the phone logs of calls between numbers in America.
Obama is now the one accusing opponents of playing politics with national security.
Three Patriot Act provisions were scheduled to expire June 1 unless reauthorized by Congress. The House had cleared the way for re-authorization and the Senate was primed to follow. But thanks to one-man vote-blocking by Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, a Republican presidential candidate, no vote was taken Sunday night, and authorization expired.
On the Senate floor, Paul was grandstanding. He had promised supporters he would “slug it out Sunday with the spy state apologists.” But some of the expiring provisions he blocked don’t even affect the public. And he refused to advance a vote on the USA Freedom Act favored by civil libertarians and politicians of both parties.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell decried “a campaign of demagoguery and disinformation.” But Tuesday, both he and Paul ended up voting against the Freedom Act, the first bill to reign in NSA powers since Snowden’s disclosures.
Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, issued a statement saying he wouldn’t support the Freedom Act in part because of the provision moving telephone records from the government to the phone companies to store. He worried, without offering a basis, that it wouldn’t work. But Tuesday, Grassley turned around and voted for the act.
The massive phone records collection that Snowden spilled the beans on reportedly hasn’t prevented a single act of terrorism. Meanwhile, an undercover investigation at the nation’s airports found 95 percent of weapons put through metal detectors went undetected.
Overly broad sweeps and generalizations don’t make us safer. Nor do theatrics by leaders playing politics. We need an open debate that engages everyone, on balancing privacy and due-process rights with giving intelligence agents the tools they need to prevent future attacks. Paul seemed to be offering such a case — until he seemed more interested in obstructionism.
We need a better understanding of motivations, domestic and foreign, before we can know how to respond to terrorism. Or even how to respond to the votes our elected officials are casting.
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