Rand Paul: Privacy Crusader!
Senate Bill 2685, the “USA Freedom Act” which would have placed significant new safeguards into electronic surveillance and ended the NSA’s meta-data collection program came up for a cloture vote today. Of course, due to the crazy precedent now set by the incoming GOP majority, the bill was unsurprisingly filibustered, and thus required a 60 vote cloture to proceed ahead. The cloture vote failed 58-42.
The voting list is somewhat predictable of course. Marco “Stop ISIS” Rubio, John “Bomb and Spy on Them All” McCain, and Lindsey “We’re All Gonna Die” Graham cast their usual votes. Perhaps more surprising is the presence of Dianne “Never Met a Spy Program She Didn’t Like” Feinstein voting for cloture on a bill she was very critical about, and the presence of Rand “Libertarian Savior” Paul on the Nay list. Other “sort of” surprises include Jerry Moran, who has been pushing very hard for tech company money.
Reminder: 41 of 42 nay votes were Republicans, and all of the Democratic senators defeated just two weeks ago voted in favor.
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That’s Democrats for you: never met a big government program they didn’t love.
Umm, I mean they’re soft on terrorism.Report
No you mean BSDIReport
“and all of the Democratic senators defeated just two weeks ago voted in favor.”
Hey, they got their pensions and the dirt the NSA has on them probably doesn’t matter anymore now that they aren’t coming back to DC.Report
Yeah. pretty much. we should vote more people out of office, if they’ll vote decent for the last few months.Report
PFF
How many times have you been stung by that line of thinking? Me, I stopped counting after a dozen.Report
No, you got it all wrong. Rand Paul voted against it only because it wasn’t strong enough. It’s all about heightening the contradictions, I think.Report
Aye – more specifically, his objection was that it included a reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act, which would otherwise need to get specifically reauthorized next year, and which is on the whole probably the greater evil from a civil liberties perspective. It’s not out of the question that his belief is that it will be possible to successfully filibuster reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act next year. I don’t think that’s a very good calculus, but it’s not an entirely unreasonable position either – last time around, about 2/3 of Democrats in the House voted against it when the House was under GOP leadership, though only about 1/5 of Senate Democrats did so under their own leadership, and two of those will be gone in January.
It’s not out of the question, though it is unlikely, that a GOP-dominated Congress will cause Democratic Senators to largely unite against a reauthorization, along with the couple of Republicans who voted against it last time around. That may be enough to mount a successful filibuster.
Again, I don’t think I agree with this calculus, and thus I think this is making the perfect the enemy of the good. But I also don’t think it’s totally disconnected from reality, either.
That said, the fact that DiFi wound up opposing cloture makes me concerned that the bill was so watered down as to be useless.Report
Ya gotta give Rand Paul credit, he desires national office and knows he’s not going to get there by depending only on the 5% primary libertarian issue voters that exist out there. He is a realist (and a whore like all other politicians but I’m not convinced that whore isn’t part of the default job description of a politician).Report
For the committed Dem partisans here, why do you believe the Evil Rethuglicans would cede this issue in the lame duck?
Are your opponents as dim-witted as you believe?
Watch for something BIGGER and BROADER with the name RAND PAUL written all over it.
Dems can take solace in getting the vote of Ted Cruz – that should tell you something.Report
Well, yet another reason to vote 3rd Party, I guess.
I do look forward to what happens at the re-authorization of PATRIOT, though.
Out of curiosity, does the Executive Branch have any jurisdiction over the NSA or is that solely the jurisdiction of Congress?Report