Senate Republicans banded together to kill a National Security Agency reform bill, but some did it for entirely opposite reasons.
The USA Freedom Act ended up two votes short of the 60 votes it needed to advance Tuesday night, 58-42. Its highest-profile opponents fell into two camps: those who thought it included too many restrictions, and those who thought it included too few.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) opposed the bill because it extended the Patriot Act into 2017. After voting it down, Paul said he “felt bad,” since “They probably needed my vote.”
But, Paul held, “It’s hard for me to vote for something I object to so much.”
Meanwhile, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was rallying the troops against the act because he feared it would limit the agency too much, at the “worst possible time to be tying our hands behind out backs.”
Other more hawkish GOP leaders, like Sen. Marco Rubio, chimed in on the same note. Rubio argued that those pushing for reform “cannot cite a single example of this program being abused.”
“Not one,” Rubio told Politico. “We are dealing with a theoretical threat.”
The bill’s Republican supporters included Sens. Ted Cruz (R- Texas), Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska).
Outside the Senate, the bill’s supporters and detractors were equally as curious.
Debate over the bill split privacy advocates. Some, like the ACLU, cautiously supported the bill, while voicing the opinion that it did not go far enough and included too many potential loopholes for the NSA. Others, like a group including the Sunlight Foundation and former whistle-blowers, refused to support it, citing its extension and legalization of invasive programs, and even some particularly vague provisions that could grant the NSA new means of gathering data.
The White House—not exactly a noted critic of the NSA—backed the bill, over concern that some national security programs could lose re-authorization without it. Tech companies also backed it, hoping to regain the consumer confidence they have so badly lost in recent years.
The bill would have banned the NSA from collecting bulk metadata without a court order, granted privacy advocates representatives on the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and freed tech companies to disclose more information on government requests for information.
