NSA surveillanceDeeply divided House rejects effort to curb NSA data collection program

In an exceedingly close vote — 205-to-217 — a bitterly divided House of Representative on Wednesday rejected legislation proposed to block the National Security Agency (NSA) from continuing its metadata collection programs.

The vote handed the Obama administration a hard-fought victory, but it was much closer than expected.

The New York Times reports that the debate over the balance between security and privacy – and whether, indeed, the NSA surveillance programs threatened privacy — saw the formation of an unusual coalition of liberal Democrats and libertarian and tea party Republicans calling for curbing the NSA surveillance power.

Members of the informal coalition vowed to continue their fight.

Representative Jerrold Nadler (D-New York) said lawmakers would keep coming back with legislation to curtail the dragnets for “metadata,” whether through phone records or Internet surveillance.

Nadler added that one way to curtail excessive surveillance would be to allow some sections of the Patriot Act to expire in 2015, thus removing the legal basis for continued domestic surveillance. “It’s going to end — now or later,” Nadler said. “The only question is when and on what terms.”

Representative Mike Rogers (R-Michigan), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, promised lawmakers that he would draft legislation this fall to add more privacy protections to government domestic surveillance programs even while he urged the House to oppose blanket restrictions on such surveillance.

The debate revolved around an amendment to the annual Defense Department spending bill offered by Representatives Justin Amash (R-Michigan), one of the leaders of the libertarian wing of the GOP, and John Conyers Jr. (D-Michigan), an old-line Detroit liberal Democrat.

The amendment would have limited NSA phone surveillance to specific targets of law enforcement investigations, not broad dragnets. It was only one of a series of proposals aiming to check the freedom of foreign policy action by President Obama, including restricting funds for Syrian rebels and adding Congressional oversight to foreign aid to Egypt.

The debate and vote on all other amendments saw a more or less predictable party line divides, the debate over restrictions on domestic surveillance saw a coalition emerging of the most liberal members of the Democratic caucus and the most libertarian members of the GOP, against a coalition of centrist, establishment Democrats and Republicans.

Representative Raúl Labrador (R-Idaho) described the unusual coalition as “the wing nut coalition,” and Amash “the chief wing nut.”

There were some surprises. Amash, who argued against domestic surveillance on Fourth Amendment grounds, found an ally in Representative James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wisconsin), the socially conservative chairman of the House Judiciary Committee who was one of the principal authors of the Patriot Act. Sensenbrenner pointedly argued that the law he wrote was never meant to create a program that allows the government to demand the phone records of every American.

“The time has come to stop it,” Sensenbrenner said.

Supporters of continued NSA surveillance included not only the administration, House Speaker House speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), and chairs and members of the relevant committees – Homeland Security, Intelligence, Armed Services, Intelligence, Foreign Relations – but leaders of the nation’s defense and intelligence establishment.

More than half a dozen national security officials from the George W. Bush administration wrote an open letter to lawmakers urging them to reject the amendment.

“Denying the NSA such access to data will leave the nation at risk,” said the letter.

Rogers, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, was especially bitter in his criticism of Amash, a fellow Michigan Republican. Amash gained popularity in social media for his anti-NSA position, but Rogers said that the House was not in the business of racking up “likes” on Facebook.

Rogers said that the NSA’s calling log program was an important tool for protecting against terrorist attacks. His voice rising, he turned to Amash and said: “This is not a game,” he fumed. “This is real. It will have real consequences.”

The Times notes that the close House vote suggests that the tide was shifting against continuation of giving the NSA wide domestic surveillance power. Analysts explain that at least part of the reason for the growing unease with domestic surveillance is the very success of the surveillance program: so many terrorist attacks here and abroad — some of them spectacular in nature – were thwarted because of the surveillance program, that the sense of urgency that gripped the nation in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 has largely dissipated. In the absence of this urgency, the more ideologically motivated members of each caucus – liberals Democrats and libertarians Republicans – feel on safer ground advocating for their preferred perspectives.

Ultimately, 94 House Republicans defied their leadership; 111 Democrats — a majority of the Democratic caucus — defied their president.