Republicans Fight Like Demons
Senate Republicans have conceded they may have to temporarily suspend plans for a long-term reauthorisation of the Patriot Act after a court ruling against its use by the National Security Agency dramatically turned around the prospects for surveillance reform in Washington.
Three US appeal court judges threw the existing plan – to extend the NSA’s power to collect bulk metadata from American phone records for five years – into chaos on Thursday when they ruled that it was unlawful even under the old legislation.
Now, with the relevant section of the Patriot Act due to expire at the end of the month, Republican leaders in Congress are scrambling to find a shorter-term fix to keep the programme alive as it looks likely that the court ruling will prevent them from securing the necessary votes for a full extension in the remaining six days of this legislative session.
“I hope we can [pass a clean reauthorisation] for at least a short period of time just so we can have this debate,” Senator John Cornyn, the majority whip, told reporters. “It’s an important debate and an important law, it’s protected Americans and saved lives, and so we don’t need to make this decision in haste.”
One option would be a one-month extension to get Congress past the 1 June deadline in exchange for Republicans allowing an alternative vote on the USA Freedom Act – a reform bill designed to replace NSA collection of telephone metadata with a scheme involving data retention by telephone companies instead.
But newly emboldened Democrats angrily denied rumours that they had agreed to such a deal on Thursday.
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