Leahy eyes NSA reform as crowning glory

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) isn’t leaving the Senate majority without a fight.

The outgoing chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee has put his full weight behind passing legislation to rein in the National Security Agency (NSA) during this year’s lame-duck session.  

Despite the uphill battle, he managed to score a key victory this week, ensuring that the bill gets a vote on the Senate floor. 

“He has been relentless and we’re quite appreciate of that,” said Laura Murphy, the head of the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Washington office.  

Getting the USA Freedom Act on the Senate docket was Leahy’s top priority for the year, even as Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and the White House seemed less willing to make it a primary issue.  

{mosads}“I think he does want to have something to show for his chairmanship,” Murphy added. “He’s not a person who gives up easily.”  

Leahy introduced the bill along with Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) — the original author of the Patriot Act — last October, months after Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA was authorized to collect records about practically every person in the country’s phone conversations.  

The bill would end the agency’s collection of that phone metadata, which includes the numbers people dial as well as the length and frequency of their calls but not the actual content of their conversations. It also seeks to make changes to the secretive federal court that oversees the nation’s intelligence programs and gives technology companies additional ways to tell the public about the information they hand over to the government.  

The effort is partly personal for Leahy, who cast his first ever Senate vote back in 1975 to establish the Church Committee, which provided new oversight of American intelligence agencies.   

For months, however, the bill sat dormant in the Senate.  

After the House passed a watered-down version of the legislation that critics said was effectively toothless, the pressure ramped up for Leahy to pass something stronger.

The new version of the bill that he introduced in July quickly won the support of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle — including unlikely allies such as Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) — as well as the tech industry, privacy advocates and key leaders of the intelligence community.  

Critics such as Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), however, worried that it would handicap federal officials from stopping terrorists; the call records can provide a key map of people’s communications. 

As the lame-duck session loomed, Reid continuously neglected to include the bill on his list of must-pass items, such as a government funding bill and a series of expired tax credits.  

“It wasn’t in the same category as the [continuing resolution] and tax extenders, and what’s going to happen with some of these other items that felt like must-do?” said Craig Albright, the head of legislative strategy for BSA | The Software Alliance, a trade group that supports the bill. “It felt like this was optional instead of in the must-do category.” 

“It wasn’t until after the election that minds actually started to focus: ‘OK, what really is possible here, given what happened in the election?” he added.  

Multiple advocates said that the results of the election helped convince Senate leaders to move forward in two ways.  

On the one hand, lawmakers were looking for areas of agreement wherever they could find it, and the broad bipartisan backing on the USA Freedom Act certainly fit the bill.  

The addition of Leahy — the chamber’s most senior lawmaker, who often has the ear of Senate leaders as well as the White House — only helped, a Senate aide said.  

At the same time, there were political motivations for Republicans and Democrats alike to do something to reform the NSA now, rather than wait until next year. The NSA program has to be reauthorized by next June or else it will dissolve entirely, an outcome that many officials have said would be disastrous.  

Politically, dealing with the divisive issue now, rather than early in their new majority, must have seemed enticing to Republicans.  

Plus, most of the hard coalition-building had already been done. 

“This thing is literally sitting at the finish line,” said Harley Geiger, the advocacy director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a digital rights group that supports the bill.  

While there will certainly still be opposition once the bill hits the Senate floor next week, a broad swath of Republicans, Democrats, advocacy groups and U.S. businesses are already on board.   

That coalition, one tech industry lobbyist said, is a testament to Leahy’s long tenure in the Congress.  

“Leahy has made it known he is a legislator; he is not a polemicist,” the lobbyist said. “He likes producing legislative accomplishments. That’s what he’s here for.”