The Republican congressional leadership didn’t even want to bring Michigan Rep. Justin Amash’s anti-surveillance amendment up for a vote. The Obama administration certainly didn’t want it to pass.
Yet last week, Amash managed to force a debate on the House floor that should have happened more than a decade ago in the aftermath of 9/11. His amendment would have denied funding to the National Security Agency’s vast data-mining program.
Amash’s opponents hid behind classified information and misguided emotionalism. “Have 12 years gone by and our memories faded so badly that we forgot what happened on Sept. 11?” asked Rep. Mike Rogers, a fellow Michigan Republican who chairs the House Intelligence Committee.
“We oppose the current effort in the House to hastily dismantle one of our intelligence community’s counterterrorism tools,” White House press secretary Jay Carney echoed in a statement.
Wisconsin Rep. James Sensenbrenner, a past chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and a co-author of the Patriot Act, was one of the 93 Republicans who voted with Amash. Sensenbrenner argued that Congress never intended for the government to sweep the phone records of all Americans.
Read More at the American Conservative . By W. James Antle III.