Yesterday, as the vote for PATRIOT reauthorization approached, Sen. Rand Paul managed to browbeat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid into allowing votes on two of Paul's amendments. These two were the weakest of the ones that Paul offered. The first was an amendment to prevent PATRIOT Act powers from being used to acquire gun ownership records -- the NRA opposed it on the grounds that it was "poorly drafted" and would have subjected gun owners to more scrutiny. The second was an amendment that would have put the onus on the government to request "Suspicious Activity Reports" from financial institutions rather than having the institutions offer them automatically. Both failed overwhelmingly.
Paul's amendment with Sen. Patrick Leahy was more promising, but it never got a vote. It would have forced the government to provide more information on its use of PATRIOT Act powers and added more privacy protection, and it had passed several times out of committee. But Republicans blocked it from getting a vote, leading Leahy to vow late last afternoon that he would offer it as a free-standing bill.
The biggest news to come out of the PATRIOT Act debate this time around, though, was not Paul's eloquent defense of Fourth Amendment rights and his Russ Feingold-like last stand against reauthorization. It's the fact that -- as first reported by Marcy Wheeler and Spencer Ackerman -- two senators, Mark Udall and Ron Wyden, believe that the Obama Justice Department is interpreting some of its provisions far more broadly than was originally intended. Wyden declared that "when the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry."
While Wyden and Udall's amendment tailored to fix the problem never got a vote either, they managed to wring a promise out of Senate Intelligence Committee Chairperson Dianne Feinstein to hold hearings on the subject. The Obama administration has disappointed its supporters more than once by adhering to precedents set by the previous administration. But the alarming claims made by Wyden and Udall foreshadow a domestic spying controversy of this administration's own making.
