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Agreed: as a British citizen, I find this vote incredibly close.

As an analogy, there is absolutely no political will here to change the status quo regarding unchecked data collection. The two largest political parties would likely be automatically against an equivalent amendment on national security grounds, whipping their members to vote against (and few members would care to break ranks).

As such, no vote would even take place. If it was forced in a full chamber, it would perhaps fall 100-550.

Edited to add: Exemplified by a spending review announced a month ago http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-23060592 "3.4% increase in combined budget for intelligence agencies": meanwhile many other budgets are squeezed by 5-10%

3.4% increase in combined budget for intelligence agencies

Yes, that was a rather striking discrepancy. Our media seem to be giving the current administration a free ride lately regarding civil liberties generally and trying to control the Internet in particular. Maybe everyone is too busy worrying about getting onto the "Bob watches porn" list this week to worry about getting onto any other lists that may or may not be relevant to this discussion as well.

It is very close, especially when you consider that a million more Americans voted for a Democrat House candidate than a Republican one.

Republicans have a 33 seat majority, despite losing the popular vote 48.7% - 47.6%, thanks to rampant gerrymandering after the 2010 election.

I did a (meaningless) back of the envelope calculation, and found that if the number of representatives were proportional to the popular vote count, and the same percentage of Democrats voted for this bill, then the bill would have passed.

Of course, it probably wouldn't have made it through the senate, since the non-talking filibuster allows any single member to effectively veto any bill brought up.

As far as I can tell, this issue crosses party lines. Republicans voted 94-134 against the amendment, and Democrats voted 111-83 for it. A fairly even spread, compared to any number of more partisan issues.

http://www.scribd.com/mobile/doc/155815805

It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with gerrymandering (though it likely does to some extent). A more likely cause is that cities tend to have a democrat win by a wide margin and rural areas tend to have a republican win by a smaller margin. Combine that with the fact that all districts aren't identical in size and you get a legitimate way for this to happen.

Whipping in the United States Congress is far less effective than in Parliament. There is no equivalent to the three line whip and the party leadership can't expel members. The most they can do to rebellious members is take away their preferred committee assignments, and even there they are hemmed in by tradition.

However, particularly for Republicans at the present time, there is always a looming threat of a primary challenge if ideological purity is not maintained.

They can't expel members, but they can certainly kick them out of caucus. That's effectively the same immediate power parties have in a parliament: when someone is removed from caucus they sit as an independent.

The biggest direct difference is that in many parliamentary systems the party has control over who will run under their banner in the next election. In the US, the only power they have is indirect via fundraising.

Really the difference is one of expectation: in the parliamentary system party discipline is just a ground rule that's understood by everybody. If your MP votes for something you don't like they can say "Yeah I didn't like that bill either and I brought up my concerns during our caucus meeting. Ultimately the party decided to support it though" and you don't really think less of them.

That expectation cuts the other way too. If a US Representative got kicked out of caucus over a controversial vote it would be considered shockingly petty. It'd be the major political story for weeks and would tarnish the whole party. In parliament that's just what happens and nobody would expect any different. A semi-recent Canadian that comes to mind: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/story/2007/06/05/b...

As you mention, they can (and do) withhold committee assignments. Usually this is done more on the sly though rather than as an obvious retaliation. Members that have a reputation for toeing the party line get the nice assignments, the pork project for their district, etc. The "guy none of us can stand but keeps getting elected without our help" just gets to posture for the cameras.

As a Swiss I'm always amazed how in indirect democracies, 'political will' equates to whatever the top ruling people are up to, depending largely on what lobbyist de jour is paying best as well as the proximity of elections. It's absurd to me to be honest. Why wouldn't you want a system where (a) the final say can always be cast by people's votes and (b) the government is put together proportionally? This basically mitigates both of these problems: (1) Elections become way less important, so the parties don't throw too much money into them - winning 2% every 4 years, in rare cases an additional cabinet member of 7, just doesn't justify putting hundreds of millions into a campaign. (2) Lobbying is worth much less as well since you can't lobby people very easily.

And yes, I'm aware that every system has flaws and people's votes aren't always sane - but given the alternatives...

I am extremely interested in direct democracy, and the possibility of using it for larger populations thanks to technology improvements. To my knowledge the main argument against direct democracy has been "it only works for small groups". Could modern computing and telecommunications change that?

First of all, yes, that's always the argument I hear. That and people not taking Switzerland seriously since it's anyway just Nazi gold and gangster banks enabling us to do what we do, right?

Online voting tools could definitely change the cost as well as the legitimacy of running a superpower scale direct democracy. In Switzerland we largely handle it through voting by letter and every commune handles the counting - technically it's certainly possible to have fraud at that point, however at least I'm not aware of any case where a people's vote would have been faked that way.

Anyway, for larger scale voting I'd have a look at this TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/david_bismark_e_voting_without_frau.... E-voting combined with tokens on paper seems to be the winner for me.

But don't forget, the stability of the Swiss system doesn't only come from its direct democratic nature, I'd say the principle of proportionality applied to the government, as I mentioned above, is at least as important. In Switzerland this ensures both checks and balances as well as a government that represents the current political views of the parliament. Also, it lead to a multi-party system with 5 larger players and dynamic coalitions depending on the actual issue. Together with the constant fear of the people's vote this handles most issues quite neatly - even if the process tends to be a bit slower, the output of 'bullshit' is much lower than the things I read from abroad if you will.

The main argument against direct democracy is the danger of majoritarian oppression: e.g. imagine calling a vote to reinstate slavery and succeeding because 51% of the population supports slavery. Having a set of laws like the Bill of Rights that is agreed upon by consensus and enforced by courts is a safeguard against that.

There's nothing in direct democracy inconsistent with a constitution securing basic rights and a supreme court enforcing it. Indeed, Switzerland has exactly that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Federal_Constitution

The main argument against, as I see it, is the lack of accountability, the prime example being California demanding more spending and lower taxes at the same time. Of course, indirect democracy has done very little to prevent that either.

When Switzerland doesn't pass laws similar to California's, I think it's because they have a much more homogenous society where there is simply a large degree of agreement on how things should be done - and so, the remaining bits lend themselves well to be decided by direct democracy.

That's also my response to the GP: no, no amount of interwebs and technology can turn a large and diverse population that disagrees fundamentally on many important issues into a small and homogenous one that agrees on most things.

The Swiss aren't homogeneous, though. They have four official languages and 20% of the country are resident foreigners. The various cantons don't often agree with each other and only 30-40% of the country votes.

Thank you. Here it is again, the 'US isn't homogeneous' excuse.

It's not like representative democracy stops this... See 1865-1965.

How likely is it that a majority of a modern society would agree to something crazy like this, vs. just the ruling party of an indirect democracy? Unfortunately we don't have much statistical evidence, since there's basically only Switzerland having such a system nationwide, but at least we know that in the history of this republic since 1848 there hasn't been such an incident, while the Weimarer Republic, culturally close to a majority of Swiss and under an indirect democratic rule, managed to elect a ruling party that went haywire.

Although I would criticise my own system just as heavily as you do, the Swiss system is not exactly idyllic either: right-wing propaganda led the Swiss people into banning minarets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minaret_controversy_in_Switzer...

As I mentioned - people's votes aren't always sane. That being said the Minaret thing was a non sensical outcome, yes, but it doesn't really change that much. Mosks are still allowed and the Muslim community didn't seem to bother too much. I'm convinced that if the initiative were to forbid mosks or any essential part of Muslim religion, the result would have been completely different.

Looking at recent referendum topics, it seems to me that the right-wing Swiss People's Party have a lot of power and skill in choosing referenda that appeal to a mob majority against vulnerable minorities.

e.g. the June 2013 referendum also has an astounding result, on Asylum law changes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_referendum%2C_2013#Asylu...

I'm really conflicted about indirect vs direct democracies.

On one hand, indirect democracies allow the ruling few to impose their will rather than the will of the people. On the other hand, many people are ignorant of the facts and could be persuaded to vote poorly (eg against the best interests of the majority) in a direct democracy.

Then the people will have to live with and hopefully learn from the consequences of their decisions.

You're right. In fact, this just in:

> Holt’s bill, the “Surveillance State Repeal Act”, would repeal the PATRIOT Act and the FISA Amendments Act, each of which contains provisions that allowed the dragnet surveillance. The bill would reinstate a uniform probable cause-based warrant standard for surveillance requests, and prohibit the federal government from forcing technology companies from building in hardware or software “back doors” to make it easier for the government to spy on the public. Additional features of the bill include the true legal protections for national security whistleblowers, as well as changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to give it greater expertise in reviewing and challenging executive branch applications for surveillance operations.

http://ggsidedocs.blogspot.com.br/2013/07/rush-holt-repeal-s...

I love having that man represent me! I pay a lot of attention to what goes on, but I could safely stop reading any news and still be sure that my representative was doing the right thing. We need more 5 time Jeopardy champions/actual rocket scientists in Congress.

make sure to vote for him on August 13 in the Senate primary.

On the other side of the coin, the 12 vote margin is still a 'no', and the party whips (or whoever was rallying the vote for this considering it was bipartisan) may have given "permission" for people to break ranks for their re-election or fundraising campaigns once the determination was made that there weren't going to be enough 'yea' votes to win it in the first place.

A 'no' is always a 'no', don't look much into the fact that it was a fairly close 'no'.

I know that is how things work, but isn't that the sign of a fundamentally broken process. Shouldn't each representative be required to vote in a way that is blind to the success or failure of a piece of legislation.

It seems like such a process would automatically bias votes against the will of the people and in favor of the lobbyists, since at the end of the day it is the lobbyists that are actually paying attention to your voting record on issues and are likely to withhold campaign donations during the next election.

Lobbyists aren't the only problem.

The House majority has 33 more seats than the minority, despite losing the popular vote by over a million votes. To me, this is the epitome of how broken Washington is. Pennsylvania has 13 Republican representatives and 5 Democrat reps, even though Democrats won the popular vote, 50.28% to 48.77%.

What "popular vote" are you talking about. It's meaningless in this context given every congressional district is a separate race.

Congressional districts are supposed to allow equitable representation. The total popular vote is useful for determining whether the representation is fair. If districts are drawn correctly then the percentage of popular vote a political party wins should be should be close to percentage of representatives elected for that party. The closer the difference between the popular vote split and the representative split, the fairer the election.

If the difference between the two tallies is off by more than 33%, then there is something fundamentally broken. It allows candidates to spew extremist views, because they won't be challenged in their home district.

I don't know the details but its not necessarily gerrymandering. if urban areas are 100% democrat while rural areas are 60% republican, you'd see this sort of elections naturally, without any foul play. that's just a natural outcomes of having districts.

So who decides the mix of urban-to-rural in each district?

It's not "indicative" of any real sinister work. It's a body of human beings, this is how bodies of human beings work. That's all.

> Shouldn't each representative be required to vote in a way that is blind to the success or failure of a piece of legislation.

I don't see how that would help unless they were somehow prevented from conspiring (i.e., discussing their votes ahead of time).

I don't think a lot of people know this. "Yes" votes are "given out" by party leaders as favors to to those who are willing to play ball so that they can please the folks back home when the outcome of the issue is already assured.

When a candidate makes a big deal during a campaign about how they voted against the grain on a particularity thorny issue that pleased a lot of voters in their district, take it with a huge grain of salt and a hard look at their broader voting record.

Notice how overwhelming the vote was for the other amendment which claimed to limit the NSA but apparently just reiterated the current wording.

The way I'm looking at it is that there was a chance that this amendment was going to be the most that was ever done about it. The door is not closed on modifying what the Intelligence Agencies surveille, and there can now be an even better bill passed outside of a defense appropriations bill, on its own terms.

It also gets lots of people on the record making claims about the capabilities of the NSA and how much they are really collecting. Many of these people are on the intelligence committee and have been fully briefed on everything the NSA is doing and they use those credentials to support their claims of authority.

Glenn Greenwald says that he has hundreds (if not thousands) of documents, including NSA training manuals, that prove Snowden's claims about NSA analysts having the technical ability to listen to and read the contents of "billions" of phone, email, and chat conversations. See his response starting at 19:51 in this interview:

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/7/18/glenn_greenwald_growin...

Senator Wyden's recent comments support the idea that there is much more coming in this story.

http://www.americanprogressaction.org/events/2013/07/16/6975...

It is incredibly hopeful that there is this much support for an amendment like this before the full story has been told. I hope the Senate is forced to take up a similar vote (less likely for sure) before the full details are published because it would be very valuable to get the position of every Senator on record before November 2014.

Is there a list/site somewhere that shows all the people that voted against vs. for this?

Yes, you can find the roll call here.

http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2013/roll412.xml

Are there any good visualizations for this data? It'd be cool to be able to like, filter it, see it on an interactive map by state, etc.

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/113-2013/h412

Coming soon

The nytimes has this: http://politics.nytimes.com/congress/votes/113/house/1/412

http://www.scribd.com/doc/155815805/Final-Vote-Results-for-R...

> I think this was a pretty hopeful vote.

It's easy to vote 'yea' on something that you know will never become law. Even if the House would have approved it AND the Senate it would just get vetoed by Obama.

I remain hopeful. And I hope this at least signals to the executive branch that maybe, just maybe the legislative branch has balls. We just need to keep the pressure on them and just keep pushing for it. Call your congress critter today.

Obama couldn't veto the Amash amendment without vetoing the entire NDAA. So, no, that's not true.

Would it be as easy as you say to veto this? There would be a HUGE uproar across the country if this had passed both houses of Congress and got killed by the Commander and Chief.

no, it was attached to the defense appropriations bill, so it wouldn't have been vetoed, but it would have been really tough to pass the Senate...

it would just get vetoed by Obama

This would be extremely important. At the moment Obama's principle seems to avoid the subject as much as possible. And if it is addressed just blaming the "system". By vetoing it he would take personal responsibility for this scandal, something he will try to avoid at all costs.

> But you should be aware that opponents of Amash had a persuasive-sounding argument for voting it down even if you believed new regulations were needed.

Compromise arguments are often persuasive, but the vast majority of legislation succumbs to the fallacy of middle ground (or "argument to moderation"), assuming that the compromise is always right.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window , for which this seems like a textbook example. Claim way too much ground, give up part of it, repeat.

This is not a case for a compromise: the program is entirely wrong and needs to entirely die.

agreed, especially how quickly it came together and how hard the Dem establishment came down on it. I hope that this is the seed for a strongly bi-partisan group of legislators concerned about civil liberties.

especially how quickly it came together

There was some great coverage of this on the BBC[1] earlier today, before the result was known:

(Quotation begins)

However, the White House said the measure would deprive the intelligence agencies of a key tool in preventing terror attacks.

"This blunt approach is not the product of an informed, open or deliberative process," said spokesman Jay Carney.

(Quotation ends)

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-23430126 (emphasis added)

Of course Jay Carney's statement was pretty ironic... Can't have an informed discussion on something that everyone lies about.

Not to mention the sheer lack of informed discussion when passing the PATRIOT Act in the first place.

A majority of House Democrats voted for it. That is a significant rebuke of the Obama administration.

Yes, the numbers were:

   Republicans: 94 yea, 134 nay (41% in favor)
   Democrats: 111 yea, 83 nay (57% in favor)

Not too surprising, since traditionally "strong on national security" is a core GOP position, and the party establishment tends to see civil-liberties challenges to national security policy as misguided. That might overrule any partisan instinct to vote against Obama.

is there a link of the individual votes? govtrack.us doesn't look to be that up to date

Yes, it was just posted: http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2013/roll412.xml

I had looked when I posted my comment so I could link it along with the numbers, but 25 mins ago it wasn't up yet.

Just talking out my butt here, but I think on most votes they have a pretty good idea of where most congresspeople plan to vote and whether or not the amendment will pass. So if some republicans knew it wouldn't pass with their yea vote, they could have felt comfortable giving it a yea as taking credit for standing up to "the administration." Whereas they may not have actually given that vote if they thought it mattered. This opinion is based on no other data than watching House of Cards on netflix and Veep on HBO.

This. The general public has no idea how much posturing is involved in such votes. These people will even trade votes: the Dem says "Please, I want to appear strong on defence, so I'll vote no, while you (the Republican) can vote yes".

Source: knew a couple of people who had worked as aides to congresscritters

I think this tweet is pretty spot on:

"Rotating Villains strike again: Just enough liberals inexplicably voted no on NSA restrictions to make it the way Obama wanted."

https://twitter.com/brmull/status/360192763502931968

You can read the read the tea leaves and see anything you want. It's unusual for so many Democrats to vote against a program being administered by a Democratic president.

Happens a lot: http://www.salon.com/2010/02/23/democrats_34/

Call me a pessimist, but those "strong on national security" might use this vote as a hammer against their opponents in future elections -- voted against securing this country against those terrorists...

Sad that this was my first thought.

Agreed. This is the closest vote on anything related to the Patriot Act in a long time; and the bipartisan support is very encouraging.

Now we know who the political enemies of true freedom are.