In the wee hours of Saturday morning, the U.S. Senate played host to a moment that took mass surveillance on the phone records of Americans from outrage to farce.

The NSA’s phone dragnet had already been declared illegal.

Earlier this month, a federal appeals court ruled that while the surveillance agency has long claimed to be acting in accordance with Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the text of that law in fact authorizes no such program. The Obama Administration has been executing a policy that the legislature never passed into being.

But the law that doesn’t even authorize the program is set to expire at the end of the month. And so the court reasoned that Congress could let it expire or vote to change it. For this reason, the court declined to issue an order shutting the program down.

President Obama didn’t shut the program down either. One might think the illegality of its ongoing operations would bother him, but he’s effectively punted to Congress too.

Days ago, the House of Representatives acted: they voted overwhelmingly, 338 to 88, “to end the National Security Agency's mass collection of phone records from millions of Americans with no ties to terrorism,” passing the USA Freedom Act, an effort “to rein in NSA surveillance while renewing key sections of the... Patriot Act.” The bill divided civil libertarians, some of whom thought it didn’t go far enough because the government could still access bulk data held by phone companies.