House conservatives today accused Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of playing politics with the 2015 USA Freedom Act, a measure designed to scale back the government’s mining of personal data in the post-9/11 era.
“I believe Mitch McConnell supports the USA Freedom Act,” Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., told reporters today at a panel event on Capitol Hill. “I think this is posturing. I don’t believe these senators who object to it really object to it. They accept the Freedom Act and they’re trying to buy some leverage to make it even worse.”
Under the USA Freedom Act, the National Security Agency’s bulk data collection program would be terminated, and phone companies would be responsible for retaining customer data.
With court approval, government officials could then request some of that data for its terrorist investigations.
The measure easily passed the House last week despite some conservatives voting against it. Those opponents argue the legislation doesn’t go far enough in preventing bulk data collection.
“I voted against the Freedom Act not because it was too strong, but because it wasn’t strong enough,” said Rep. Raúl Labrador, R-Idaho. “It didn’t protect the Fourth Amendment like it should.”
McConnell, R-Ky., opposes the USA Freedom Act for a different reason.
He argues that ending the program could be dangerous to America’s national security.
Instead, McConnell is fighting for a two-month extension of the Patriot Act, which is set to expire on May 31.
“I don’t want us to go dark, in effect, and I’m afraid that the House-passed bill will basically be the end of the program and we will not able to have yet another tool that we need to combat this terrorist threat from overseas,” McConnell said on ABC’s “This Week.”
McConnell, along with other Bush-era Republicans, fear that phone companies are not prepared to retain mass amounts of data, which could potentially harm anti-terrorist investigations.
House conservatives dismissed that concern, and said there’s “no support” for a clean reauthorization of the Patriot Act.
“I think it’s a waste of time for Mitch McConnell to really even talk about it because it has no chance in the House and I think no chance in the Senate,” Amash said.
Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., a conservative member of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, echoed Amash’s sentiment.
I believe this is just posturing right now and tactful negotiation to say that we’re going to do a clean reauthorization to hold that over the heads of conservative senators to get them to comply and finally agree with the reserve price, which is the Freedom Act that passed the House.
The extent of the bulk data collection came to light when former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents, exposing a secret court order that mandated Verizon hand over its phone records for all of its customers.
Libertarians, conservatives and Democrats alike have rallied against the agency’s data-mining tactics, arguing that it’s a violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.
