Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is trying to do an
end-run around the legislative process when it comes to reauthorizing the Patriot Act, and with it the bulk collection of Americans' phone records. Undeterred, bipartisan legislators in both the House and Senate
introduced their reform bills Tuesday.
The bills would effectively end the spy agency's bulk collection of U.S. phone records, the first and one of the most controversial programs exposed by Edward Snowden nearly two years ago.
Intelligence agencies would instead be allowed to request call metadata—the numbers, time stamps, and duration of a call but not its content—from phone companies on an as-needed basis after obtaining judicial approval. […]
The Senate bill's lead sponsors are Patrick Leahy, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Sen. Mike Lee, a tea-party Republican from Utah. Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, is said to not be an original cosponsor of the measure, despite his office being deeply engaged in weeks of negotiations regarding NSA reform. […]
House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, ranking member John Conyers, and Reps. Jerrold Nadler and Jim Sensenbrenner—the original author of the Patriot Act—are all original cosponsors of the House version. A House Judiciary aide said the panel intends to vote on the bill this Thursday at 10 a.m.
With the House acting so quickly, McConnell's bid to forestall these reform bills might be shot, though it's unclear how Grassley will proceed and whether he'll allow hearings on the Leahy-Lee bill. If the House does act and pass this through, the Senate will likely be forced to do something—there's a June 1 deadline, when Section 215 and two other provisions are set to sunset. It wouldn't be a disaster at all if Congress missed this deadline and Section 215 did expire. Starting over from scratch would probably be preferable to even this bill from Leahy, which has added some sweeteners to the intelligence committee that civil liberties groups, like the ACLU, object to. The chances of that happening seem slim, however. The intelligence community almost always wins, so expect some form of a reauthorization bill to hit the Senate floor in the coming weeks.