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On Friday, July 19, on
the House floor, Majority Leader Eric Cantor pulled Representative Justin Amash
aside, ushering him into a meeting with whip Kevin McCarthy and three of
Amash’s congressional allies.
Cantor pressed Amash to withdraw his amendment to
stop the National Security Agency from collecting logs of every American’s
phone calls and said he would work to provide a vote on the issue in a future
bill.
But several of Cantor’s top aides, who were also
present, gave what Amash thought was a more threatening overture: There’s bound
to be a procedural technicality we can use to kill the amendment, they said,
and we’re going to find it.
The meeting, which has not been previously
reported, underscores the efforts of some in House leadership to stop the
proposal, which was offered as an amendment to the Department of Defense
appropriations bill, from coming to a vote, according to documents reviewed by National Review and to interviews
with participants.The amendment had already been through the procedural
wringer, with the House parliamentarian’s office giving an initial approval
that it was “in order” to change its mind only as outside parties, including
GOP leadership, weighed in.
Indeed, prior to an all-important Rules Committee
meeting that would decide whether the amendment ever got to see the light of
day, the measure was headed for a premature death.
It was Speaker John Boehner who ultimately saved
it, giving the amendment the green light after discussing it for the first time
with Amash on the House floor on Monday night — minutes before the Rules
Committee had been slated to kill it.
Boehner never told Amash why he would give the Michigan
Republican, of all people, the privilege of the vote. Amash had helped lead a
failed coup attempt against the speaker in January, and Boehner was so deeply
opposed to the amendment he took the rare step of voting against it. (By
tradition, the speaker doesn’t usually vote.)
But one animated and colorful conversation later,
the amendment was en route to the House floor, prompting panic from its
opponents on the House Intelligence Committee, who later that night announced
an emergency classified briefing with General Keith Alexander, the NSA
director, the next day.
The vote, once it was finally permitted, exposed a
large bipartisan coalition with concerns about the NSA’s aggressive use of the
Patriot Act to collect vast amounts of “metadata” from phone companies.
Despite President Obama’s pleas to vote against the
amendment, 111 House Democrats — 55 percent of the caucus — voted for the
amendment. Over 80 percent of the Progressive Caucus backed the proposal, which
was cosponsored by Representative John Conyers, the top Democrat on the
Judiciary Committee.
Alexander, the NSA chief, was forced to personally
lobby members, calling their cell phones and opening with a joke that, yes, he
already had their number.
But the final tally, 217–205 against, also showed
the resilience of the intelligence establishment. Tuesday morning, as
Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers of Michigan surveyed his task
ahead, it was daunting: According to an internal tally, over 300 members had
issued public statements of concern about the NSA’s data-collection program,
which was first revealed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in early June.
Amash first began working on the amendment the
first week of July, asking his deputy chief of staff, Will Adams, to work up
some language they could use to stop the mass collection of phone records while
leaving the government’s other authorities intact.
Aides to Conyers, who with Amash had cosponsored a
bill on the issue a month earlier, caught wind of the effort and quickly signed
on. Soon Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a fellow libertarian
Republican and one of Amash’s top allies, and Representative Jared Polis, a
liberal Democrat from Colorado, had joined as well. Another young conservative
firebrand, Representative Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina, joined soon after.
Amash’s staff began working with experts from the
Congressional Research Service, Congress’s in-house think tank, to craft an
amendment that would address the issue and stay within the lines of House rules
that govern which types of amendments can be considered on certain types of
bills — in this case an appropriations, or spending, bill.
The referee for those kinds of questions is the
House parliamentarian’s office, where nonpartisan lawyers decide what to allow based
on 224 years of precedent found in 28 bound volumes. The parliamentarian’s
office, or “parls,” in congressional-aide vernacular, is so inside-baseball
that even the vast majority of aides and Capitol Hill reporters never really
think about or discuss its role in the process.
But, in the case of the Amash amendment, the
parliamentarian’s office turned out to be a major battlefield — and the means
its enemies used to try to kill it.
On July 16, the parliamentarian’s office gave its
initial preliminary approval, ruling that Amash’s amendment was “in order.”
About 24 hours later, that decision had changed. Amash’s aide Adams was told
that outside parties had weighed in and raised previously unforeseen procedural
arguments against the amendment.
Amash’s office worked with the CRS expert and Rules
Committee staff, who appear to have been a neutral force throughout the debate,
to rewrite the amendment.
From this process, two competing narratives have
emerged. In one, leadership is bending backward to help Amash’s amendment come
to the floor. In the other, plugged-in aides kept throwing up constant
roadblocks to try to suppress the amendment.
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