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| click the screen capture to read it |
With all the impeachment smokescreening, the House did it. Or say the Democratic Party leadership and rank and file did it. Commentary exists online, here, here, here, here, and here; while excerpting here will be primarily from New Republic coverage, and Common Dreams [source of the opening screen capture].
New Republic excerpt:
It may seem to many Americans that Washington is entirely consumed by the impeachment inquiry, and that no other important business is getting done on Capitol Hill. But on Tuesday, in a break from televised hearings, the House of Representatives voted to fund the government through December 20. If passed by the Senate, the continuing resolution would prevent a government shutdown and forestall a debate about border-wall funding.
That’s all well and good, except that Democratic leaders had slipped something else into the bill: a three-month extension of the Patriot Act, the post-9/11 law that gave the federal government sweeping surveillance and search powers and circumvented traditional law-enforcement rules. Key provisions of the Patriot Act were set to expire on December 15, including Section 215, the legal underpinning of the call detail records program exposed in the very first Edward Snowden leak.
“It’s surreal,” Representative Justin Amash told me on Tuesday, just before the vote. Amash, an independent who left the Republican Party over his opposition to President Trump, pointed to the hypocrisy on both sides of the aisle. Republicans have “decried FISA abuse” against the president and his aides, he said, referring to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, “and Democrats have highlighted Trump’s abuse of his executive powers, yet they’re teaming up to extend the administration’s authority to warrantlessly gather data on Americans.”
By tucking the measure into a must-pass bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi forced many members who oppose the Patriot Act to vote in favor of its extension. “Although I do have serious concerns with reauthorizing Section 215,” Representative Bobby Rush of Illinois told The Hill, “we must focus on the bigger picture here.” In late October, Rush signed a letter co-authored by Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Earl Blumenauer, which read, “We will not support any legislation that extends Section 215’s sunset date if it fails to contain robust reforms that protect innocent people from unjust surveillance.”
On Monday night, Amash submitted an amendment to strip the Patriot Act language from the budget bill, but the amendment was blocked by Democrats on the Rules Committee.
Just 10 Democrats defied the leadership to vote against the resolution, including Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, and Ilhan Omar (a.k.a. “the Squad”). [...] Ultimately, the funding bill passed 231-192, mostly on party lines.
Some advocates have questioned whether the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), which includes the Squad, should have done more to combat—or, at least, register its dissatisfaction with—the last-minute maneuver by Democratic leadership. On Wednesday morning, leaders of the CPC and the libertarian House Freedom Caucus circulated a joint letter on Capitol Hill calling for extensive reforms to the Patriot Act before it is reauthorized. But when it came time for the floor vote, CPC co-chairs Pramila Jayapal and Mark Pocan voted in favor of the funding measure. So did most of the caucus’s members. The only person in CPC leadership to vote against the bill was Omar.
[...] “There’s no other way to spin this,” a progressive staffer on the Hill told me. “This was a major capitulation. The progressive caucus has touted itself as an organization that can wield power and leverage the votes of its 90 members. And they didn’t lift a finger. Democratic leadership rammed this down their throats.”
[...] Jayapal, the CPC co-chair, denied that this was a situation of Democratic leadership bearing down on progressives. “That happens pretty often,” she said, laughing. “So I actually know what that feels like. This wasn’t one of them.”
According to Jayapal, negotiations between members of the Judiciary Committee and the NSA-friendly House Permanent Subcommittee on Intelligence (HPSCI) were going well. “Almost every single thing in our letter has been addressed, but not quite to our level of satisfaction,” Jayapal said. “We’re still pushing really hard, and we need this extra time to be able to finish that.” Without HPSCI’s buy-in, she said, “there’s no point in marking up a bill … because that is often where we run into problems.”
[...] If the House had not passed the extension, she said, the GOP-led Senate would have sent over a clean reauthorization bill (with no reforms), and she worries moderate Democrats might have gone along with it—especially if faced with the alternative of allowing the provisions to expire altogether. “You could go through and name any strategy for me, and I would tell you why it would fail,” she said.
As for allowing the Patriot Act to sunset, Jayapal told me, “There was no scenario in which this thing was going to expire.” Eighteen years after 9/11, raising the specter of “the next attack” still has political potency. “We already heard that from the Senate,” Jayapal said.
These views represent competing visions for how progressives should wield power in Congress. Jayapal’s pragmatic streak has often contrasted with the more openly confrontational approach of Ocasio-Cortez or Tlaib. While members of the Squad have seemed to relish fights with top Democrats, Jayapal has advocated for sticking to principles, while finding ways to work collaboratively with leadership.
“In my ideal world, we wouldn’t have the Patriot Act. Period,” Jayapal said, “but that’s not where we are.
That extended quote captures most of the report. The Common Dreams item parallels New Republic, in less detail, and aside from the opening paragraphs in the screen capture, it will not be quoted here.
BOTTOM LINE: The reauthorization measure is aimed to avoid a holiday government shutdown, and allows at a later time the opportunity to trim or quell offensive Patriot Act provisions. The action was to include it in a temporary funding package to avoid confrontation over spending extension authorization if proposed without kicking the Patriot Act abomination can down the road, for tomorrow or the day after. While the damned surveillance of citizens provisions should never have been passed, the time to refight over such crap will be after the holidays, during the primary season and the ramp up to November.
Whether that was the wisest thing to do now, or not, is moot now because the choice to kick the can down the road has been made by the House, with the Senate now forced to consider and do something, or to be responsible for a shutdown and its costs if the Senate does nothing.
Politics sometimes carries a miasma. Even when done in relative stealth. And you thought the impeachment show was the only show in town ... The old shell game. The pea is always under a different shell than you thought you saw it end up. Pelosi leadership, with Hoyer, the pair shown in the screen capture; as great as they are (perhaps a much smaller image was due).
Note that links in either featured article are omitted; e.g., New Republic links to a pdf of the continuing resolution bill which the House passed. (For following several links, seek out the original online items; however, you can read the actual resolution text online, in pdf form, here; at p.25 of 26 pages; SEC. 1703. SUNSETS.)