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Hill’s Bipartisan Deadlock on Phone Records May Be Easing

NSA compromise is brewing for House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., right, and ranking member Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)
NSA compromise is brewing for House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., right, and ranking member Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)

Eight months ago, in one of its most important and fascinatingly nonpartisan votes of recent memory, the House came up just seven members short of eviscerating the government’s vast effort to keep tabs on American phone habits.  

The roll call revealed a profound divide in Congress on how assertively the intelligence community should be allowed to probe into the personal lives of private citizens in the cause of thwarting terrorism. It is a split that has stymied legislative efforts to revamp the National Security Agency’s bulk data collection programs.  

Until now, maybe. Senior members with jurisdiction over the surveillance efforts, in both parties and on both sides of the Hill, are signaling generalized and tentative but nonetheless clear support for the central elements of a proposed compromise that President Barack Obama previewed Tuesday and will formally unveil by week’s end.  

The president, in other words, may be close to finding the congressional sweet spot on one of the most vexing problems he’s faced — an issue that surged onto Washington’s agenda after the secret phone records collection efforts were disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.  

If Obama can seal the deal, which he’s pledged to push for by the end of June, it would almost surely rank among his most important second-term victories at the Capitol. It also would create an exception that proves the rule about the improbability of bipartisan agreement on hot-button issues in an election season. “I recognize that people were concerned about what might happen in the future with that bulk data,” Obama said at a news conference in The Hague, where he’s been working to gain support for containing Russia from a group of European leaders who have their own complaints about U.S. spying on telephone calls. “This proposal that’s been presented to me would eliminate that concern.”  

The top two members of the House Intelligence Committee, GOP Chairman Mike Rogers of Michigan and ranking Democrat C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, introduced their own bill to revamp surveillance policy Tuesday — and declared they expect it would track very closely with the language coming from the administration. They said they had been negotiating with White House officials for several weeks and viewed the two proposals as compatible.  

At their core, both the Obama and House bills would end the NSA practice of sucking up and storing for five years the date and time, duration and destination of many millions of phone calls placed or received by Americans. Instead, the phone companies would be required to retain this so-called metadata (and comparable information about email and Internet use) for 18 months, their current practice. And the government would have to obtain something like a search warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, meaning in each discreet case a judge would limit how deeply the telecom companies would have to query their databases in hopes of finding calling patterns that suggest national security threats.  

Since both Rogers and Ruppersberger have been prominent defenders of the bulk collection system, any agreement they reach that has Obama’s blessing can be expected to pass the House.  

It should garner support from a lopsided majority of the 217 House members (three-fifths of the Republicans and two-fifths of the Democrats) who voted to stick with the status quo last July. And it stands a chance to win over at least some on the other side — an unusual coalition of 94 mostly libertarian-leaning tea party Republicans and 111 liberal Democrats, who say NSA searches of the databases should be limited to information about existing targets of investigations.  

But one leader of that camp vowed to work for the defeat of any measure that looks like either the Obama or Intelligence panel plans. Republican Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, who as chairman of House Judiciary a decade ago was instrumental in writing the Patriot Act, believes that law has been grossly misapplied by the NSA to invade personal privacy much too easily.  

Sensenbrenner said he would continue to push his measure to almost entirely prevent the NSA from looking at telecommunications metadata. But the sponsor of the companion Senate bill, Judiciary Chairman Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., said he would remain open to finding the makings of a deal in the Obama plan. Leahy signaled the legislative negotiating would be much smoother if Obama suspended the bulk data collection during the talks.  

Much more enthusiastic was Calfornia’s Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who said she generally supports the House proposal and views Obama’s plan “a worthy effort.” Her committee’s top Republican, the retiring Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, was a bit more equivocal but gave a strong indication he was eager to cut a deal based on the ideas from the House and the White House.  

There are plenty of important points over which to haggle: about the ways the metadata is to be retained, the format for FBI to view the information, the liability for the telecommunications companies, the specificity of the search requests and the reach and secrecy of the judicial oversight.  

And the American Civil Liberties Union said it had already found enough differences between the two measures unveiled Tuesday to give its “crucial first step” blessing to the Obama plan while rejecting the Rogers-Ruppersberger bill. The ACLU said that proposal would end up expanding the FBI’s investigative reach instead of limiting it.  

But in a year when all sides say they are still ready to share the credit for at least one more top-tier legislative accomplishment, the knot over surveillance may be starting to unravel.

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