Yesterday, a vote on reauthorizing three expiring provisions of the PATRIOT Act failed after most Democrats and a few Republicans voted against it. The three sunsetting provisions were: Roving wiretaps, Section 215 orders, and the “Lone Wolf” provision, which has never been used. The roving wiretaps allow the government to obtain surveillance orders that don’t identify either the target of the wiretap, Section 215 allows the government to obtain “any tangible thing” it deems relevant to a terrorism investigation, and the “Lone Wolf” provision allows covert surveillance of “non-U.S. persons” believed to be an “agent of a foreign power.”
So does the vote represent a new Tea Party revolt against big government? Hardly. Only 26 Republicans voted against the bill, and there are 52 members of the Republican Tea Party Caucus, whose chairperson, Rep. Michele Bachmann, voted for reauthorization along with most of the rest of her caucus. As Dave Weigel points out, only eight of the 26 were Republican freshmen elected last November. One hundred and twenty-two Democrats voted against reauthorization, I suspect most of them just because they could.
So how did the bill fail? Basically Republicans were trying to pass the bill under “suspension of the rules,” which is considered the process for passing “noncontroversial” legislation. You need a two thirds majority of those present to pass bills that way. For one brief night, Republicans in the House learned what it was like to be a Democrat in the Senate.
Sadly, the revolt probably won’t last, as there are more than the 218 votes needed to pass reauthorization under normal procedures. The fight really seems to be over whether the reauthorization will contain mild oversight provisions, and when the provisions will actually sunset. As Julian Sanchez notes, there are two Democratic Senate versions which reauthorize these provisions for three years, but the Republican House version sunsets them until December 2011, while the Republican Senate proposal makes them permanent. Senator Patrick Leahy‘s version of the bill would reign in Section 215 orders and provide some key oversight over the use of the widely abused National Security Letters, but those modest reforms were too much for Senator Dianne Feinstein so she introduced an alternate bill without them.
The Republican House version places reauthorization right in the middle of presidential primary season, while the Democratic versions kick the can down the road three years. That means that we might be looking forward to the Republican candidates’ positions on the PATRIOT Act becoming an issue, which may lead to some irresponsible grandstanding about the necessity of passing the PATRIOT Act without any meaningful oversight. Remember “double Guantanamo?”
