Senate Republicans will gather together late Sunday afternoon in a room near the chamber in order to plot a path forward on an expiring federal surveillance law.
“We should know more” after the meeting, a GOP aide told the Washington Examiner. GOP senators were expected to meet at 5 p.m.
The Senate’s unusual Sunday session gaveled in with Democrats taking to the Senate floor to criticize Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., over the pending expiration of key parts of the USA Patriot Act. Those provisions expire at midnight, and are likely to lapse thanks to an internal divide over whether or how to extend them.
“The job of the leader is to have a plan,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said. “In this case it is clear the Majority Leader simply didn’t have a plan.”
Reid and Senate Judiciary Committee ranking member Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., accused McConnell of ignoring a chance to negotiate a bill five months ago and instead bringing to the floor a bill to extend the surveillance law for five years in its current form.
“We are in a manufactured, unnecessary crisis,” Leahy said.
Reid and Leahy pushed for the passage of the USA Freedom Act, which extends the law with significant privacy reforms, including the elimination of the NSA’s practice of collecting domestic data in bulk.
The House passed the measure overwhelmingly last month.
It fell three votes short in the Senate earlier this month but the Senate will take it up again tonight at 6 p.m.
McConnell spoke on the Senate floor briefly Sunday, but only to offer condolences to Vice President Joe Biden, whose son, Beau Biden, died Saturday of brain cancer.
“I’ll have more to say about the business of the Senate later,” McConnell said.
