Senate Republicans are scrambling to reach a consensus on how to reauthorise critical portions of the Patriot Act, as momentum appeared to be building for a surveillance reform bill passed by the House of Representatives.



The US Senate prepared itself for a weekend vote series on a number of measures before skipping town until 1 June – the same day key provisions of the Patriot Act are set to expire. But Republican leaders acknowledged they had yet to reach an agreement that would prevent a lapse, even if momentary, in the National Security Agency’s surveillance capabilities.

Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, looked increasingly boxed in by his own refusal to rein in the federal government’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records. The Kentucky Republican had initially sought a full renewal of the Patriot Act in its current form through 2020, even though the House voted overwhelmingly in favour of a bill that would end the very same bulk collection.

McConnell and his allies then set their sights on a two-month Patriot Act extension that would buy further time to negotiate while clearing the sunset deadline for Section 215, the piece of the law that enables the NSA to sweep millions of Americans’ phone records without a warrant.

But several Republicans emerging from a closed-door meeting on Thursday cast doubt on whether even the two-month extension would pass the Senate amid pressure from the GOP-led House and the Obama administration to take up the House-passed USA Freedom Act.

A informal count of voting intentions by the Guardian suggested Democrats were just a handful of senators short of the necessary 60 votes needed to pass the next procedural hurdle on the USA Freedom Act, with a total of 46 Democrats and 11 Republicans either for the legislation or declining to say whether they would now block a vote.

Richard Burr, the North Carolina Republican who chairs the intelligence committee, predicted both the two-month extension and the USA Freedom Act would fail to get the 60 votes required to pass the Senate. Burr, who has supported a full reauthorisation of the Patriot Act with McConnell, said an even shorter extension – of either two or four weeks – might even be considered as a last-ditch effort.

GOP leaders acknowledged to reporters that discussions around a shorter stopgap measure were under way, but still signalled they might roll the dice and see how the votes would play out on the Senate floor before pursuing other options.

John Cornyn, the Republican whip, remained hopeful that members could be persuaded to support the two-month extension if the House-passed Freedom Act failed.

“Nobody wants us to go dark on our ability to detect terrorist activity, so I imagine there will be some very urgent discussions and we’ll work something out that will get us to a place where we can have deliberate debate and amendments and votes,” Cornyn told reporters on Capitol Hill. “My view is there will be an extension, I just can’t tell you how long.”

It nonetheless remained a key sticking point that the majority of Senate Republicans do not believe the Patriot Act infringes on Americans’ privacy rights. Many said they felt the NSA’s programmes have been mischaracterised and stoked fears over national security to justify their existence.

South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican weighing a run for president, said lawmakers were “playing with fire” by insisting on reforms that he suggested would compromise the NSA’s capabilities.

“I’ve got one goal – I don’t mind reforming the programme,” Graham told reporters. “I just don’t to create a situation where we’re more likely to be attacked. The Snowden event – I don’t want to overreact to it.”

A spokeswoman for Rand Paul would not comment on whether the Kentucky senator might also vote in favour of cloture, even though has repeatedly said he is against the bill itself because it does not go far enough.

Earlier, a group of half a dozen senators from both parties met with national security council officials in the White House situation room to hear a briefing on the practical impact of the competing legislation.

One senior administration official told the Guardian that the meeting helped reassure Congress that the USA Freedom Act would preserve what officials believe are essential surveillance capabilities.

Without passage of either bill, the administration has warned that the NSA would need to start making preparations for ending its bulk collection programme from this weekend to avoid any possible breach of the law.

But with so much of the legal authority already up in the air following an adverse ruling by the US appeal court, the more significant deadline remains the expiry of the existing Patriot Act provision at midnight on 31 May.

With the House not due back in until at least 9am on 1 June, this means that Congress may no longer simply be able to “extend” section 215 of the Patriot Act but may need to amend language further to restore the lapsed provisions from scratch.