The House of Representatives passed legislation Wednesday that would strip the government of the statutory authority it says allows for dragnet collection of U.S. phone records. The limited reform threatens to undermine courtroom efforts to have such activities branded unconstitutional.

Legal scholars say at least three of six major lawsuits against the program likely would be doomed if the USA Freedom Act passes the Senate and becomes law, including an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit that won a groundbreaking ruling last week from a federal appeals court panel.

A stalled lawsuit filed jointly by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and the group FreedomWorks also would face probable dismissal, as would another from Idaho neonatal nurse Anna Smith that an appeals court panel heard in December.

A rash of lawsuit dismissals would deprive citizens not only of the satisfaction of possible rulings that President Barack Obama and his predecessor ordered violations of their constitutional rights, but would limit potential tracks to Supreme Court review of a 36-year-old precedent the government says allows it to collect huge amounts of data provided by ordinary Americans to businesses.

The decision in Smith v. Maryland, the government says, means that Americans have no expectation of privacy over information they voluntarily share with businesses, allowing the government to collect it without warrants based on probable cause.

The decades-old case involved records of outgoing phone calls made by a criminal suspect in a limited timeframe, but its possible applications have proliferated as Americans increasingly rely on smartphones and the Internet.

Generally, courts do not dismiss lawsuits if the challenged behavior is voluntarily ended and capable of repetition, but legislation ending the collection likely would be seen as a permanent resolution by judges, legal scholars say, scuttling lawsuits that do not seek damages.

The three judges who handed a win to the ACLU – finding the phone record collection exceeds the authority granted by Section 215 – acknowledged in their ruling the case may soon be mooted.

“[W]e are not unmindful that a full debate by Congress of the appropriateness of a program such as that now operated by the government may result in the approval of a program with greater safeguards for privacy, or with other limitations, that are not now in place and that could alter or even moot the issues presented by appellants,” the judges wrote.

“In the last Congress, for example, a bill to authorize a modified version of the telephone metadata program, supported by the Administration, passed the House of Representatives,” they wrote, referring to the Freedom Act.

Law professors Martin Redish of Northwestern University, Douglas Laycock of the University of Virginia and Richard Fallon of Harvard University, who are experts on mootness, told U.S. News last year, when the Freedom Act last advanced in Congress, many of the lawsuits are likely to be dismissed if legislation ends the phone record collection.

Fallon said suits that request damages or deletion of records might be able to continue. But Redish and Laycock pointed out requests for damages may fail, leading courts to dismiss the surviving lawsuits without addressing the underlying claims.

“It’s pretty inconceivable that the Supreme Court would hear one of these cases after a statute makes them moot,” Laycock said.

Lawsuits that do seek damages include legal activist Larry Klayman’s challenge, which won the first, and thus-far only, District Court ruling against the program, and two lawsuits from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Klayman’s lawsuit was considered by an appeals panel in November, after the Supreme Court declined a request for speedy review. The cases from EFF, which assisted Klayman and Smith in their appeals, remain in District Court.

Many privacy and civil liberties advocates say Congress should let Section 215 expire – which may itself moot the cases – fearing its continued existence with Freedom Act modifications would allow for more creative and secret reinterpretations by authorities.

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The passage of legislation that would reauthorize or modify Section 215 – scheduled to expire June 1 – is not guaranteed, particularly in the Senate, where many members sympathetic to NSA programs oppose the Freedom Act and where NSA critic Paul says he’ll filibuster efforts to renew the provision.