opinion

There is much to decipher in votes on spying policies

If you followed Sunday night’s stalled Senate effort to reauthorize the Patriot Act, and the standoff over the reform-oriented USA Freedom Act, you may not even be sure which side you’re on. It’s not your fault.

The standoff has seemed more about politics than substance, yet disagreement over the substance hasn’t broken along clean political lines. By the time the Senate passed the Freedom Act on Tuesday, it was tough to decipher the motivations of key players.

Start with President Barack Obama. As a senator from Illinois and a Democratic presidential candidate, he had effectively appealed to disillusioned civil libertarians by disparaging President George W. Bush’s post-9/11 intelligence programs. Passed after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Patriot Act gave the federal government unprecedented powers to collect data on Americans in the name of national security. Decrying secret courts, warrantless wiretaps and an administration that “acts like violating civil liberties is the way to enhance our security,” Obama called the private-data collection campaign “a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.”

Yet as president, Obama has presided over a growth in secret surveillance, even as public indignation over it has swelled with disclosures leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. That includes accessing the servers of Internet companies for communications between Americans and people abroad, and collecting the phone logs of calls between numbers in America.

Obama is now the one accusing opponents of playing politics with national security.

Three Patriot Act provisions were scheduled to expire June 1 unless reauthorized by Congress. The House had cleared the way for re-authorization and the Senate was primed to follow. But thanks to one-man vote-blocking by Republican presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, no vote was taken, and authorization expired. So the NSA couldn’t collect new phone logs, the FBI couldn’t get wiretap orders to follow a suspect who changes phones, or a lone suspect who isn’t linked to a group.

It has put Paul in the doghouse with leaders in his own party, but apparently to his political advantage as he courts libertarian votes. He quipped that some senators “want there to be an attack on the U.S. so they can blame it on me.”

On the Senate floor, Paul was grandstanding. He had promised supporters he would “slug it out Sunday with the spy state apologists.” But some of the expiring provisions he blocked don’t even affect the public parties.

Paul’s antics didn’t sit well with Sen. John McCain, the former Republican presidential nominee, who called him “the worst candidate we could put forward.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell decried “a campaign of demagoguery and disinformation.” But Tuesday, both he and Paul ended up voting against the Freedom Act, the first bill to rein in NSA powers since Snowden’s disclosures.

The White House had called on the Senate to end “this irresponsible lapse in authorities,” and urged individual senators to “put aside their partisan motivations.” But just when you would have expected the mainstream Republican establishment to get behind the bills offered by a president inching closer to their corner, along comes Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley. The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee had issued a statement saying he wouldn’t support the Freedom Act in part because of the provision moving telephone records from the government to the phone companies to store. He worried, without offering a basis, that it wouldn’t work.

But Tuesday, Grassley turned around and voted for the act. Fellow Republican Joni Ernst voted against it.

Grassley had opposed reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, including a due-process provision that would let a panel of outside experts “challenge the government’s pleadings” in certain circumstances. He objected to treaties to prevent nuclear proliferation and terrorism because, among other things, they don’t authorize the death penalty.

As this internal drama plays out, there’s broad agreement that our strategy against the Islamic State isn’t winning. The massive phone records collection that Snowden spilled the beans on reportedly hasn’t prevented a single act of terrorism. Meanwhile, an undercover investigation at the nation’s airports found 95 percent of weapons put through metal detectors went undetected.

Overly broad sweeps and generalizations don’t make us safer. Nor do theatrics by leaders playing politics. We need an open debate that engages everyone on balancing privacy and due-process rights with giving intelligence agents the tools they need to pursue bona fide suspects and prevent future attacks. Paul seemed to be offering such a case — until he seemed more interested in obstructionism.

We need a better understanding of motivations, domestic and foreign, before we can know how to respond to terrorism. Or even how to respond to the votes of our elected officials.

Rekha Basu is a columnist for the Des Moines Register. Write her at 715 Locust St., Des Moines, IA 50309 or email her at rbasu@dmreg.com