President Obama gained some bipartisan leverage in a showdown with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell over the extent of the nation’s spying capabilities, but it’s still unclear how far the president will muscle into the debate to shift the outcome.
Obama backs significant changes to Section 215 of the Patriot Act that the U.S. government’s intelligence agencies have used to justify the bulk collection of Americans phone call data.
Faced with a deadline of June 1 to re-authorize the law, McConnell and Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., are pushing a straight renewal of the Patriot Act that includes no changes to the bulk collection of data that former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden exposed two years ago.
The issue unites civil liberty-minded lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, and Republicans and Democrats have worked across the aisle and the Capitol over the last year to forge a compromise on legislation to overhaul the 215 provision of the law.
A measure sponsored by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., who authored the original Patriot Act, and Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., fell just a few votes shy of passing the Senate late last year. And the House Judiciary Committee since then has been hard at work on another version, called the USA Freedom Act.
That bill would end the NSA’s phone-records collection program, requiring the agency to obtain a court order before sweeping up records from phone companies.
The House Judiciary Committee overwhelmingly approved the USA Freedom Act Thursday on a 25-2 vote, and is expected to win broad approval by the full House.
“The bill ends bulk collection once and for all,” the House bill’s sponsors said in a joint statement after the panel voted.
The more House support the bill receives, the more difficult it will be for McConnell to protect the phone-snooping provisions in a straight or slightly modified renewal.
The White House earlier this week praised the bill as a good first step but stopped short of endorsing it completely.
Obama last year came out with his own set of reforms to the phone data collection, arguing that he preferred to preserve the program’s collection capabilities as long as the phone companies, not the government was responsible for holding the bulk data.
On Wednesday, however, the White House appeared ready to make some concessions on that score and back — at least initially the USA Freedom bill.
“I can tell you that we are gratified that some of those reforms are included in a recent piece of legislation that has bipartisan support in both the House and Senate,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said of the bill.
“We’re going to continue to review the text of the bill before we render a final judgment on it,” he said.
Earnest also stopped short of saying that the president would veto a straight renewal of the law, although such a development appears unlikely now after the lopsided vote in favor of reforms in the House Judiciary Committee.
“The proposal —the clean renewal that’s been put forward by Senator McConnell does not include those reforms,” he said. “And the president was quite definitive about the need to make those kinds of reforms a top priority.”
In a post-Sept. 11 change to the federal government’s spying capabilities, the NSA collected and stored five years’ worth of U.S.-based phone records, including the time and duration of the calls but not the content of them. The government maintains that the bulk data is only collected and that agencies don’t look at the data unless they have a specific terrorist threat to dive into the stored information.
But critics of the law, including Sensenbrenner, Leahy and many others on both sides of the aisle, say the collection itself is an abuse of Americans’ civil liberties and argue that the spying is unnecessarily broad and hasn’t proved useful in countering terrorism.
