Two years after Rand Paul’s infamous 13-hour-long filibuster, he’s already planning his next.
Paul told the New Hampshire Union Leader he will filibuster the “clean” (featuring no privacy reforms) Patriot Act extension sought by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
“I’m going to lead the charge in the next couple of weeks as the Patriot Act comes forward,” he said. “We will be filibustering. We will be trying to stop it. We are not going to let them run over us. And we are going to demand amendments and we are going to make sure the American people know that some of us at least are opposed to unlawful searches.”
Sen. Ron Wyden has also threatened to filibuster an extension, telling MSNBC this weekend, “If for example, they decide to go with some sort of short-term extension of this flawed law, I intend to filibuster that on the floor of the Senate unless there are major reforms like getting rid of the bulk phone records collection program.”
“I’m tired of extending a bad law,” he said.
McConnell and others, like Marco Rubio, want to simply extend the Patriot Act provisions set to expire on June 1–including Section 215, which the government uses to justify the NSA’s phone metadata gathering. A federal court recently ruled this justification invalid, and left it up to Congress to decide whether they will explicitly authorize the program.
The House is expected to soon pass another version of the USA Freedom Act, the reform bill which narrowly failed in the Senate last year. It’s unclear whether McConnell would allow a vote on this in the Senate, but reform advocates are insisting his clean extension has no chance of passing.
“Anyone who is looking at this honestly has to acknowledge that the straight reauthorization — the so-called clean reauthorization — is utterly unrealistic,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) told Politico. “There simply are not 218 votes in the House to do that, and there are not 60 votes in Senate to do that.”
