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President Barack Obama warned of potentially dire consequences if the Senate balks at renewing US surveillance authorities, as one of the law's chief critics vowed a showdown when lawmakers convene Sunday for a vote.
Obama and the administration's chief law enforcement and intelligence officials made public appeals for Senators to approve House legislation that would renew three provisions of the Patriot Act that are set to expire at 12:01 am Monday.
"Heaven forbid we've got a problem where we could've prevented a terrorist attack or apprehended someone who was engaged in dangerous activity but we didn't do so simply because of inaction in the Senate," Obama said Friday after meeting with Attorney General Loretta Lynch in the Oval Office.
Kentucky Senator and Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul, also made a pitch, asking supporters in an e-mail Friday to join him in opposing National Security Agency spying.
While the administration has dispatched Obama's national security aides to lobby senators, Paul said he has not heard from "anyone that's interested in negotiating" and there is no deal being offered to meet his concerns about civil liberties.
"We fought a revolution over this," Paul told a Republican Party meeting Friday in Rock Hill, South Carolina.
The president, a number of lawmakers and a coalition of companies and technology groups are urging senators to pass House legislation that would extend the three expiring provisions of the Patriot Act and that attempts to address some of the civil liberty concerns by prohibiting the government from collecting telephone records in bulk. It would require the NSA to get court warrants to obtain individual phone records held by telecommunication companies.
The bill, known as the USA Freedom Act, was passed by the House 338-88 on May 13. It fell three votes short of the 60 needed to advance in the Senate on May 23. Whether it can pass during the unusual Sunday session isn't clear. Paul, like any US senator, has the ability to tie the chamber in procedural knots to delay further action beyond the expiration of the three surveillance provisions.
"This whole thing is ridiculous," Representative Devin Nunes, a California Republican and chairman of the House intelligence committee, said in a phone interview. Nunes sponsored the House bill. "It may be a joke to some and nice fundraising gimmicks, but at the end of the day it won't be funny if somebody gets killed," he said.
Other Republicans led by Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell oppose the bill for different reasons than Paul. They're unconvinced the government will have adequate technology to search phone records held by carriers. McConnell, with Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina, was seeking changes to the bill.
Without the provisions "the intelligence community will lose important capabilities," Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said in a statement. "We would lose entirely an important capability that helps us identify potential US-based associates of foreign terrorists."
Those measures allow investigators to seize targeted phone, hotel and banking records of suspected terrorists and spies; use roving wiretaps; and use tools to search for lone-wolf terrorists not connected to an organization. Other NSA surveillance methods would continue unchanged.
With an expiration, the government wouldn't be able to collect and store bulk phone records. Instead, investigators would have to get a court warrant and go to phone companies to obtain individual records.
