The Senate will take up a House-passed measure that would add significant restrictions and reforms to a controversial surveillance program operated by the National Security Agency to combat domestic terrorism.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., announced Tuesday he will allow a vote on the USA Freedom Act, despite his opposition to the legislation.
“I certainly think we ought to allow a vote on the House-passed bill,” McConnell said after a private meeting with GOP senators. “If there are not enough votes to pass that, then we need to look at an alternative. And I am not making a prediction right now about how it comes out.”
Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, cited a looming deadline as the reason behind McConnell’s change of heart.
Key parts of the law that allow domestic surveillance expire on June 1. Congress is scheduled to leave for a week-long recess on Friday, which means members won’t return until the week of June 1.
If the law is allowed to expire, it would prevent the NSA from operating the surveillance program entirely.
“What makes most sense is to give senators a chance to vote on the House bill,” Cornyn said in light of the looming deadline.
Cornyn said if the USA Freedom Bill failed, the Senate would take up a two-month extension of the current law, “while we work out the differences” in new legislation.
McConnell’s announcement follows increasing pressure from his own Republican rank and file as well as GOP leaders in the House, which passed the legislation by a wide and bipartisan margin last week.
The bill would end the NSA’s bulk collection of domestic data and adds other reforms, including additional court oversight of domestic surveillance. The Obama administration supports it.
“The USA Freedom Act had 338 votes in the House,” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said Tuesday. “That is beyond veto proof and a strong showing about where the American people are on the issue.”
Neither McConnell nor Cornyn, however, could predict whether there are 60 votes in the Senate to pass the USA Freedom Act, and time is running short.
If a two-month extension were needed, that would give lawmakers additional time to come up with a compromise, possibly like the one under development by Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr, R-N.C.
Burr, who opposes the USA Freedom Act, is writing legislation that would extend the transition time for the NSA to end its bulk collection to a new system where it would have to seek judicial approval to request saved data from the telecommunications companies.
“It would be to verify that doing searches while the records are actually in the hands of the phone company would actually work,” Cornyn said. “Right now it’s a six-month transition in the USA Freedom bill, but nobody knows at the end of that if it is going to work as effectively as the current system. That’s something we ought to know before we change it.”
