Mitch McConnell rarely goes out on a limb on issues that divide Senate Republicans. He’s more prone to sit back and listen, let his conference work out their differences — and only then assert his own views.

But the majority leader ditched that dispassionate approach when it came time to renew the country’s anti-terrorism surveillance laws — he spoke out early and vociferously against reforming soon-to-expire PATRIOT Act provisions — and the departure now threatens to undermine the Kentucky Republican’s vow to bring more responsible governance to the Senate.


For weeks, McConnell tried to lay the groundwork for an extension of the post-9/11 law, only to be boxed into a corner by the House GOP leadership and his junior senator from Kentucky, Rand Paul, who’ve pushed to substantially change or end the program.

Headed into a rare Sunday session, McConnell now has a choice: He can capitulate from his position and let a House-passed bill pass over his own objections, seek to amend the House bill or continue to insist on a short-term extension. With no deal, he could witness the collapse of the sweeping surveillance program on his own watch.

McConnell’s chief nemesis said the majority leader should have seen this coming.

“He defiantly said we’re going to do all this. [But] things happen,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said in an interview last week about McConnell’s plans to finish the surveillance law before adjourning for recess. “You just never know; you can’t be defiant.”

The essence of the dispute is over the National Security Agency’s mass collection of Americans’ phone records, which McConnell and national security hawks are eager to maintain because they say it’s central to the nation’s fight against terrorism. But buoyed by civil libertarian concerns, House Republicans endorsed a White House-supported bill called the USA Freedom Act that would effectively end the bulk data program as it’s currently constituted.

With no deal by 11:59 p.m. Sunday, the bulk data collection program will lapse along with two other key PATRIOT Act authorities: one to surveil suspected “lone wolf” terrorists who aren’t members of a known terrorist group and another to allow federal authorities to use roving wiretaps to track potential assailants’ patterns. Federal authorities flatly warn there would be severe disruption to surveillance operations if Congress doesn’t reach a deal Sunday, and the administration has already begun dismantling the program.

A spokesman for McConnell pointed to his comments last week suggesting that a short-term extension is the only way for the Senate to work out a bill with the House “that does not destroy an important counter-terrorism tool that’s needed to protect American lives.”

On most thorny issues, McConnell sees his job as guiding the Senate to a result. His colleagues will battle out the matter behind closed doors, and he rarely dictates strategy in those private sessions. That often leaves the caucus with little clear direction on the way forward, even as they’re aware McConnell almost always has an unspoken plan in mind.

In this case, though, McConnell has made clear he detests the House’s USA Freedom Act, which passed that body on a commanding 338-88 vote. He has publicly and privately urged his colleagues to vote against it. Rather than moving the matter through the normal committee process, as he has long vowed to do, McConnell bypassed the Senate Judiciary Committee by attempting to put extensions of the current law — ranging from two months to more than five years — on the Senate floor.

In a 1,283-word speech Friday, he forcefully called for an extension of the expiring law and criticized the House’s legislative effort as lacking “at a moment of elevated threats to the American people.”

“We need to recognize that terrorist tactics and the nature of the threat have changed, and that at a moment of elevated threat it would be a mistake to take from our intelligence community any of the valuable tools needed to build a complete picture of terrorist networks and their plans — such as the bulk data collection program,” McConnell said, referring to the expiring authorities of the PATRIOT Act. “The intelligence community needs these tools to protect Americans.”

McConnell’s stance was dealt a blow earlier this month when a federal court ruled that Congress never authorized the NSA’s bulk data program. It only got worse when the issue reached the Senate floor late Friday night and into the wee hours of Saturday.

The Republican leader’s two-month extension failed on a 45-54 vote; by contrast, the USA Freedom Act received 57 votes, just three shy of surmounting McConnell’s effort to block it. Paul, along with Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), objected to even shorter-term measures, forcing McConnell to return early from the Memorial Day recess for a Senate session that will kick off just eight hours before the PATRIOT Act authorities expire.

On Wednesday afternoon, senior Republicans said there’s no clear way out of the mess even as they were generally hopeful about a resolution by the time lawmakers return to Washington. Privately, though, some of McConnell’s allies believe the only escape hatch would be to let the USA Freedom Act pass the Senate.

McConnell’s strategy has perplexed some senators trying to find ways to work with him across party lines. The majority leader’s mantra that the Senate is “back to work” is in jeopardy.

“Sen. McConnell genuinely wants the Senate to work. And right now it clearly isn’t,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), one of a handful of Democrats to meet one-on-one with McConnell this year, said Wednesday. “I genuinely do not understand Majority Leader McConnell’s strategy and views on this issue. He has departed from Speaker [John] Boehner, many in his own caucus and my caucus.”

The PATRIOT Act fiasco also threatens to overshadow some of McConnell’s big-ticket accomplishments that had members of both parties optimistic that the chamber really was becoming more functional under his tenure. The Senate this year has passed a budget, a bipartisan fast-track trade bill and the Keystone XL pipeline — all of which languished in the Democratic Senate in 2014.

The trade bill was an especially big win for McConnell. But he prioritized it over the PATRIOT Act on the Senate floor, figuring that at the last minute his members would at least give him a short-term extension to allow for more time to negotiate changes to parts of the USA Freedom Act that McConnell and other hawkish senators believe are unworkable.

“I don’t think people really anticipated the intransigence of Sen. Rand Paul and Ron Wyden and others,” said Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), who voted against the USA Freedom Act and the short-term extension.

The episode has sparked a round of recriminations between House and Senate Republicans — and raised questions about what McConnell, regarded as a seasoned tactician by nearly everyone on Capitol Hill, was thinking.

“He could have handled it better by being more prepared in advance for it. They ran out the clock basically by working on trade first; he probably should have ran the clock out on [surveillance] instead,” said Rep. Reid Ribble (R-Wis.). “I don’t know what his strategy is here. I’m a little bit flummoxed.”

To meet the midnight Sunday deadline, McConnell will either have to cut a deal with Paul, who’s making demands that other lawmakers object to — or hope that senators, when confronted by a deadline that’s hours instead of days away, relent and agree to a temporary extension.

Even if he were to agree to hold another vote on the House bill — which would make telephone companies, not the federal government, responsible for holding records that the NSA could access through a secret court order — Paul would have to agree to go along and yield back time to finish before midnight Monday. But the 2016 candidate doesn’t like the House bill; he wants an outright repeal of the PATRIOT Act.

Nevertheless, some Republicans who disagree with him on the surveillance issue are confident he won’t let the PATRIOT Act expire on his watch.

“He respects the will of the Senate and the will of its members,” said Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), who opposes McConnell’s push to temporarily prolong the current law. “I think the Senate will have active debate [on Sunday], the Senate will be driving toward consensus, and I tend to see consensus building on the USA Freedom Act.”

Seung Min Kim contributed to this report.