Sen. Tom Cotton, McConnell's new cheerleader for unlawful surveillance.
Within a couple of hours of the
ruling from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals that the bulk collection of American's cell phone data by the NSA is illegal, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell hit the Senate floor with several of his colleagues to
demagogue and fearmonger about the need to preserve this authority (which the court has now ruled was actually never granted) and keep bulk collection alive.
McConnell argued that the House-passed USA Freedom Act wouldn't end bulk collection, it would just require that it be collected by the phone companies, and it "switches this responsibility from the NSA, with total oversight, to corporate employees with uncertain supervision and protocols." Except that whole "oversight" being nonexistent, that's not an argument that answers at all the courts ruling. Maintaining the bulk collection on the part of the government is no longer tenable under this ruling without serious amendment, which McConnell is still arguing for. But then the bullshit really began.
Sen. Tom Cotton, an outspoken and hawkish freshman, spoke on the floor in support of McConnell. He argued that private companies would be ill equipped to handle the demands of the NSA. ...
"This is the gap that contributed in part to our failure to stop the 9/11 attacks," said Cotton. […] Cotton argued that if senators are not convinced that "the wolves are at the door," then maybe they should be attending classified briefings more regularly. […]
[Sen. Marco] Rubio also said that "if this program had existed before 9/11, it is quite possible" that the U.S. would have known about one of the hijackers, and "there is a probability that American lives could've been saved.
Never mind the rule of law, we're under attack! And never mind that the attacks on 9/11 could have been averted if an arrogant and complacent President George W. Bush didn't blow off the very specific warnings his national security team provided that the attack was highly likely—warnings the Bush team derived without the use of having access to the metadata of every American's cell phone.
McConnell can't achieve his goal of a "clean" reauthorization of this law. That's because there's no reauthorizing this provision that a federal court just said wasn't authorized under the law in the first place. But beyond that, he's unlikely to muster 60 votes to block a filibuster. There's widespread and bipartisan opposition to him. The White House has weighed in behind the USA Freedom Act which is likely to pass the House in the coming days. As hard it would be for McConnell to muster 60 votes to preserve bulk collection as is in the Senate following the court ruling, it would be next to impossible to get 218 votes in the House.