McConnell tries to turn tables on Dems with cyber bill

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is firing back at Senate Democrats’ procedural threats — by daring them to oppose a cybersecurity bill just days after a massive attack on the federal government’s computer systems was revealed.

On Tuesday, McConnell announced his strategy to link the cybersecurity measure to a sweeping defense policy bill that’s now on the Senate floor. That could make it harder for Democrats to oppose the underlying bill, which they say uses a budget gimmick to boost defense funding.


McConnell is hoping that by attaching cybersecurity legislation to that national security proposal, he can make Democrats think twice about blocking it and perhaps even force President Barack Obama to reconsider his veto threat on the National Defense Authorization Act. The White House has pointedly criticized Congress for not passing cybersecurity legislation, with press secretary Josh Earnest telling Congress to come out of the “dark ages” and get the job done.

But now, McConnell is hoping to turn the tables on Democrats, setting up either the president or the Senate minority to take the blame for inaction on cybersecurity in an age where large data breaches have become commonplace.

“We’ll be doing both the [National Defense Authorization Act] and cybersecurity in the course of this debate,” McConnell told reporters on Tuesday. “It might or might not deal with every aspect of what apparently happened a few days ago. But Congress is going to act on cybersecurity on this bill in the very near future.”

In his typical, closely held style, McConnell didn’t publicly roll out his rebuttal to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid’s latest parliamentary warfare until Tuesday. First, the Kentucky Republican briefed his leadership team during the regular weekly meeting on Tuesday morning; then he told his entire conference at lunch.

And finally, McConnell nonchalantly unveiled the latest strategy at his weekly news conference.

Even before the cyberattacks — which hit 4 million current and former federal employees and were revealed last week — McConnell had planned to bring up the cybersecurity legislation sometime this month. That measure passed the Senate Intelligence Committee in March on a 14-1 vote but has since been stuck in a crowded queue, leapfrogged by trade and Iran bills on the Senate floor.

The attacks on the Office of Personnel Management spurred calls to act faster on the cybersecurity measure in the Senate, which has lagged behind the House on the issue. In April, the House passed similar cybersecurity legislation that aides have said could be easily merged with the Senate’s version.

Still, Democrats were caught off-guard by McConnell’s latest maneuver on the cybersecurity bill, which would allow private companies to share information about cyberthreats with the federal government. They said they were blindsided by McConnell, who gave no previous indication he would marry the two pieces of legislation.

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) slammed the cybersecurity bill for being “cloaked in secrecy” and criticized McConnell’s decision to fast-track it through the Senate.

“I am deeply concerned that the Republican leader now wants the Senate to pass this information-sharing bill without any opportunity for the kind of public debate it needs,” Leahy said. “This is not the transparent and meaningful committee process the Republican leader promised just months ago.”

Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said “we’ll certainly consider” McConnell’s strategy but added: “It’s not, I think, in the concept of what [Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John] McCain and I were talking about.”

“Sounds like McConnell is just looking for cover since he knows NDAA is headed for a veto,” said one senior Democratic aide.

McConnell’s move could also avoid a potentially thorny debate over privacy, given that Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and other like-minded senators likely would have tried to enhance the cybersecurity legislation’s privacy protections. There are only limited avenues to make changes to an amendment, so offering the cyber measure as an addition to the defense measure may sidestep any move by Wyden, who helped stymie McConnell’s effort to extend key provisions of the PATRIOT Act in May.

“There were some things we were hoping to still be able to tweak with that legislation,” said Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), who backed the cybersecurity bill in the Intelligence Committee and said he would have preferred that it come up as a stand-alone measure. “One of the downsides to just making it an amendment to a really large piece of legislation is that that would preclude us, at least in practice, from being able to get at some of those issues.”

Wyden, who was the sole senator to vote against the cybersecurity bill in committee, said Tuesday that he’ll “oppose very strongly” McConnell’s move to combine both measures.

“I think that moving the cybersecurity bill now is a bad excuse for a bad piece of legislation,” Wyden said. “If you have a cyber bill without real privacy protections, it’s not really a cybersecurity bill anymore. It’s a surveillance bill.”

Republicans were hopeful that McConnell’s latest strategic gambit would pay big dividends by forcing Democrats off their threatened filibuster and Obama off his veto threat.

“We need to help [Democrats] find a way to vote for a plan that basically does what the president wants to do on national defense,” said Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.).

Jeremy Herb contributed to this report.