Why lawmakers just voted against their own bill to reform the NSA | Hacker News Reader

Why lawmakers just voted against their own bill to reform the NSA

washingtonpost.com

102 pointsLibertatea15 comments

So the House Committee on Rules committee butchered this bill to the point where it actively went against the legislative intent. In case anyone is curious, here's the current members of the House Committee on Rules:

- Pete Sessions, Texas, Chairman (R)

- Virginia Foxx, North Carolina Vice Chair (R)

- Rob Bishop, Utah (R)

- Tom Cole, Oklahoma (R)

- Rob Woodall, Georgia (R)

- Rich Nugent, Florida (R)

- Daniel Webster, Florida (R)

- Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Florida (R)

- Michael C. Burgess, Texas (R)

- Louise Slaughter, New York, Ranking Member (D)

- James P. McGovern, Massachusetts (D)

- Alcee Hastings, Florida (D)

- Jared Polis, Colorado (D)

It would be nice if Congress had a concept of a "code freeze".

This quote as also odd:

> “While far from perfect, this bill is an unambiguous statement of congressional intent to rein in the out-of-control NSA," said Laura W. Murphy, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington legislative office.

A statement of congressional intent sounds like asking someone nicely.

In a parliamentary system the analogy of a code freeze would be a "vote" on the substantive motion.

At the moment the bill is in committee and is being amended - I trust that who suggests and votes for amendments is a matter of public record? if not then the USA has a lot more to worry about that the NSA.

Except in the US after Congress and the Senate pass the bill a conference committee gets to make the two versions match so I believe the "vote" on the substantive motion couldn't occur until it's in conference.

Also the votes for amendments may only be recorded as voice vote (not a roll call I believe) which means you wouldn't know who voted for what. Who offered the amendment should be public record.

Why do news stories like this never link to the actual text of the bill? Isn't it a little worrying when the participants in a democracy consider their governance "over their head" or simply boring? It seems symptomatic of the broader problem the bill is meant to curb: that we've let our rulers get away from us and left them dabbling in their own hidden sandbox.

Is there any way to tell who is responsible for the watered down sections that allow for bulk data collection?

According to the article, the watering down happened in the House Rules Committee (where democracy goes to die), so you can check their archives. I didn't see a transcript, but there is a link to hearing video.

http://rules.house.gov/bill/113/hr-3361

After a period of major reform at the end of the 19th century, and especially since the procedural struggles over civil rights legislation in the 1960s, power in the House has been increasingly concentrated in the hands of the Speaker. So it is a good bet that whoever was responsible had Boehner's acquiescence if not outright support.

The Speaker in turn answers to the caucus which selects him, and Republicans in particular by and large hold to the Hastert rule which says that nothing should be brought to the floor unless it has support of a majority of the majority.

So what is meant to be an approximation of the will of the people, becomes under the Hastert Rule, an approximation of the will of the people so long as the people's will meets the approval of a select group of ~25% of the people's representatives.

The greatest flaw of representative democracy is that the people's will must meet the approval of some or all of their elected representatives. Due to the many and varied issues that come across the legislative bodies, you will inevitably have issues where the majority of the people are at odds with the majority of representatives. Every candidate in an election is a compromise; the voter agrees with them on some issues, but not others. The bigger Congressional districts get, the worse the problem becomes.

Typical legislative sleight-of-hand - welcome to the sausage factory. Further developments will probably reveal that the new law enshrines the status quo.

The people who also voted for this incarnation of the bill now wield another political tool come the next election season: calling their opponents flip floppers.

Here you go -

http://www.wral.com/house-poised-to-pass-curbs-on-nsa-survei...

"NSA officials were pleased with the bill for another reason: The new arrangement will give them access to mobile calling records they did not have under the old program."

We begin therefore where they are determined not to end, with the question whether any form of democratic self-government, anywhere, is consistent with the kind of massive, pervasive, surveillance into which the Unites States government has led not only us but the world.

This should not actually be a complicated inquiry.

http://snowdenandthefuture.info/events.html

Would you kindly stop spamming this link into every tangentially related article?

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