I have a post up at Greg's place explaining that no, the Tea Party didn't kill the reauthorization of three expiring provisions of the PATRIOT Act. Here, I'll go into a bit more detail about what these provisions do.
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 the target of the wiretap, Section 215 allows the government to obtain "any tangible thing" (mostly certain types of records) 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." The "Lone Wolf" provision has actually never been used.
Explaining how broad these powers are might better be done by listing the reforms Sen. Patrick Leahy had proposed. He wasn't seeking to curtail the government's ability to use these powers so much as require the government to justify their use beforehand with statements of fact showing how they were relevant to the investigation, and to ensure the government follow "minimization" procedures, which just means that they don't hold on to personal information longer than they need to. The reforms weren't enough for the ACLU, which said that "while this bill makes important changes to the Patriot Act to increase oversight of its powers, it unfortunately allows many dangerous provisions to continue."
As I noted at Greg's place, they were too much for Sen. Diane Feinstein, who introduced her own bill without the provisions. But what Leahy was asking for was extremely modest and merely highlighted the fact that the government needs so little justification for invoking these immense surveillance powers. The real story of the PATRIOT Act is not last night's bipartisan rejection of the expiring provisions, possible only because under the rules the House needed a 2/3 majority vote, but the rather overwhelming bipartisan majority for keeping them, unaltered and without oversight.
