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In order to do that, it’s important to go back to what happened in the aftermath of the Snowden reporting and the controversies it caused, particularly over domestic spying in the United States. In the months following the original reporting we did on the metadata program and the collection of huge amounts of data on Americans’ communication activities, there was a bill proposed in the House, jointly sponsored on the one hand by Justin Amash, the libertarian Republican from Michigan, and on the other hand by John Conyers, the liberal Democrat from Detroit, that was designed to overhaul and seriously reform domestic spying activities in the US.

At first when they introduced it, nobody took it seriously because there have been no bills passed by the US Congress since 9/11 that significantly reined in government powers — every bill passed in the name of the war on terror has expanded and increased government powers. So nobody took seriously the idea that the US Congress was going to rein in powers granted in the name of terrorism. But because of the controversy being created by the Snowden story and the nature of the factions in the House, they quickly started to attract support and got enough at first to force John Boehner to agree to let them bring it to the floor and have a House vote. Then they got enough support that it made it look like it was going to pass. The only reason it ended up not passing was because the White House summoned Nancy Pelosi and said, “We need you to whip votes against this bill.” She got enough Democrats in her caucus who had originally intended to vote for it to vote against it and make sure that it failed, protecting the ability of the NSA to spy on Americans en masse.

It was Nancy Pelosi who was overwhelmingly responsible for its defeat. There were lots of Republicans who joined with her — she actually worked with Boehner, who was also against it, but it was Pelosi who saved the day. But at least there you can say, OK, it’s kind of hypocritical for the Democrats, especially liberals like Pelosi, who are supposed to be proponents of reeling in these intelligence agencies, to be the one to save the NSA, but at least she’s doing the bidding of a Democratic president. It’s normal that politicians, as gross as it is, defend government power when their own party’s in control of it and only oppose it when the other party is. So at least she had that excuse. Fast forward four years later and now we don’t have Barack Obama running the NSA and the other executive-branch agencies that have so much power. We have somebody who, according to Pelosi herself, is an authoritarian, if not a fascist, who is also unprecedentedly corrupt, who will do anything to destroy his political enemies, and is probably a traitor, or at least an agent of an enemy power, which in her mind is Russia. These are all things Democrats believe about the person who’s now running these agencies.

So, there was another movement in the House to again rein in the NSA, because this bill that she helped pass in 2013 was expiring and there was an attempt from liberals and libertarians to try and rein it in again. This time, not only do you have the Democrats like Nancy Pelosi saying the person in charge of this spying power is a fascist, authoritarian, a liar, and corrupt, and an agent of an enemy power; you have Republicans who have spent the last year saying what they call the “deep state” now, which certainly includes the NSA and the CIA, are radically corrupt and abusing their spying powers for political ends to go after Trump and his allies who these agencies hate, in their view. So you have this perfect political moment where both parties have very compelling reasons to rein in these spying powers: the Democrats because they’re afraid of how Trump is going to abuse them, the Republicans because they think these agencies are abusing their powers for political reasons.

What happened was, again, there were enough Republicans who were opposed to the bill sponsored by Devin Nunes to simply extend the bill without any reforms, and even increase the NSA’s power to spy in certain instances in the domestic context, there were all these people, enough Republicans opposed to it that if Democrats had stayed unified against that bill, it would have failed and there would have been reform. Instead, what happened was Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff, who has spent the last year accusing Trump of being a traitor, joined with Paul Ryan and the majority of the Republican caucus and voted for Devin Nunes’s bill to block all reforms of NSA domestic spying and even increase the powers that Trump now has to spy on the American citizenry. It is mind-boggling that Nancy Pelosi, Devin Nunes, and Adam Schiff got away with helping the Republicans increase Donald Trump’s domestic spying power, and it’s equally mind-boggling that Devin Nunes, Paul Ryan, and all those people who have spent the last year accusing the deep state of being corrupt, did the same thing and got away with it.