I consider dropping the warrant requirement from the last attempt as not much of a loss, since the previous FISA applications were being rubber-stamped anyway.

Forcing another vote in two years is better than the original 8, and better than the failed compromise of 5 in my book. Not as good as it should have been (not reauthorizing at all), better than it could have been.

2) Cowardice. Being personally punished (say, by losing an election) for problems caused by too much spying or too much military spending or too much surveillance is vanishingly unlikely. Being punished because something bad happens and maybe that thing you voted against would have prevented it? That’s possible.

3) Probably blackmail campaigns by various law enforcement and spy agencies, aimed at politicians. I very much doubt that sort of thing stopped after Hoover was gone, or that the FBI was the only agency to engage in it. I guess the “how we got here” for this part is failing to aggressively dismantle the whole tainted edifice and start from scratch back when that was feasible, and failure to keep those agencies on an extremely tight leash.