Whether or not this results in actually de-funding the NSA spying on US citizens it is still an important vote.
First, every member of the House will need to say whether they support spying on all citizens or not. They are on the clock for re-election in 16 months, less for primaries. Being on record for supporting spying on their electorate will cause more then a few to lose. That's a good thing.
Second, if by some chance the amendment passes the House, then the President can no longer claim he is spying on us with the support of the other two branches of government. He will need to acknowledge that he doesn't have the support of the American people.
Politics is a process. Things don't change in a day. That doesn't mean we should give up or get frustrated. This is a very good step in the long process to change things.
Does the Senate ordinarily fillibuster appropriations bills?
The Senate still has their secret, hands-free fillibuster. This one could die in the senate, or be the bill that forces the Dems to change the Senate's fillibuster rules.
Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.
I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.
I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it.
Sometimes a limb just becomes so rotten the only option is amputation. The only problem with that is that there is a pretty good chance this limb will craw away afterwards.
"the president has said that he welcomes a debate about how best to simultaneously safeguard both our national security and the privacy of our citizens."
Yeah, as long as that debate takes place on news casts and meetings and not, you know, the legislature or the courts or anywhere that can possibly do anything about it.
Speaking of promoting misunderstanding, your incorrect characterisation of this amendment as a bill in it's own right has prompted, to date, no fewer than half a dozen people to earnestly speculate that the President will certainly veto the bill - thus defunding the entire Defense Department, rather than just one program - should it pass.
Sure, but if the House and Senate were to pass it, it makes the President veto it (either explicitly or through inaction).
This requires a higher level of support for the measure than previously expressed - At that point, you're saying "I as the Executive, think this is more important than the will of congress."
Politically, that's harder to justify.
There's also the (unlikely) scenario where it would have enough votes to override a veto, even if the President remained fully against it.
The president can't veto an amendment, he has to veto the entire bill. It would be hilarious if with out sufficient votes his veto resulted in the DoD having no money.
Basically, he can't veto the bill and survive politically...
Certainly - But he could veto the bill, and tell them to resubmit with that clause removed.
It'd bounce it back down, and start the process again - Upping the stakes on both sides.
There's a lot of political tricks that could (and have) be used when congress and the President vehemently disagree.
In this case, however, I don't think it'd ever get that far.
I don't think the issue is popular enough pass the senate, nevermind with a veto-proof majority.
Even then, The Senate is run by the Dems, and (IMO) they're unlikely to want override a veto on a President of their own party.
"Certainly - But he could veto the bill, and tell them to resubmit with that clause removed. It'd bounce it back down, and start the process again - Upping the stakes on both sides."
It would be interesting to see what his supporters say if that happens. Remember how Obama did not do this with the NDAA that allowed indefinite detentions? His supporters were claiming that nothing could be done because it is suicidal to veto funding for the troops.
It would be a permanent embarrassment to his legacy to perpetuate this state of affairs via a signing statement. At the very least, I doubt his ego would allow it.
My understanding of the US political process is based off what I have learned from TV and the news, but even if it passed the House and Senate, the President can still veto this bill, right? So, since we already know the President supports this cause, and it is his last term, the chances of this becoming law are nil.
What is interesting is that if the bill passes with a 2/3 majority Presidents are unlikely to use the Veto. Nothing stops them from vetoing it but they usually take the passing with that strong of a margin as an indication that the veto would be overridden anyway.
Congress can override the president's veto. "[the veto] can be limited, as in the legislative process of the United States, where a two-thirds vote in both the House and Senate may override a Presidential veto of legislation."[0]
Well, it depends on the level of support it gets. If it passes, and Americans show increased support for the effort, it will gain support. A presidential veto could potentially energize this support (granted, it could also kill it). If Americans make it known that this is a big issue for them, there is a chance it could get enough support to override the veto (I'm assuming there are a few Republicans who support PRISM that would vote to override the veto just to knock Obama around a bit).
1. Congress can override a Presidential veto with a vote a two-thirds majority in the both chambers.
2. The President can also let a Bill sit for 11 or 12 days (it's really 10, but Sundays don't count.) At that point it becomes law without the President's signature.
Minor correction that is not particularly meaningful here:
2. The President can also let a Bill sit for 11 or 12 days (it's really 10, but Sundays don't count.) At that point it becomes law without the President's signature UNLESS CONGRESS ADJORNS DURING THIS PERIOD, THEN IT DOES NOT BECOME LAW (KNOWN AS A "POCKET VETO").
Yes he could veto the bill, but this bill contains multiple parts and I believe is the entire DoD budget. So if he did so the US would have no DoD budget. That would be very bad for him.
None of the other comments here are wrong, but they don't address the issue of a Presidential Veto affecting the entire bill not just the amendment.
There's lots of other tricksy stuff too, though, like signing statements. The president could say collecting meta data related to terrorists isn't spying on American's even if that meta data includes American data...basically ordering the executive branch to interpret the law as meta data is fine.
I am puzzled by all of this apparent concern people have over privacy all of a sudden. Over a year ago, an essay [1] written by Judge Kozinski was submitted [2]. This was one of the most insightful and important essays on privacy and how we are at risk of losing much of it written in the last quarter century or more. It got NO votes and drew NO comments. (It has 2 points because 2 separate people submitted it).
It's currently an open question whether or not what the NSA is doing violates the 4th Amendment. Even if it is a violation of the 4th Amendment rightnow, it will not be in a few years due to the factors Kozinski discusses.
I find "why are we only now getting upset" remarks to be as silly as the "what are you hiding?" ones. The reason there was zero support/interest in that the essay is that it failed to hit close to home to the general population. I had no idea the thing even existed.
And therein lies the interesting thing about the Snowden leaks. They were tailor-made to get people riled up over something that they could mostly understand, and the media actually covered it to some degree (although they could have done more). Just like people get cringey when you throw around the "T" word, a government overreaching like this will piss off liberal and conservative American non-politicians alike.
What the NSA is doing is wrong, and it doesn't matter WHY people are up in arms now versus X number of years later. That's completely irrelevant. We should all be stoked that we're still seeing discussion about this a month+ later.
> ...the White House is officially urging Congress to reject it: "This blunt approach is not the product of an informed, open, or deliberative process..."
Oh, did we have one of those when it was funded? Must have missed it.
That's not exactly the trajectory evidenced by the numbers: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34424.pdf (Figure 4, p. 17). Discretionary spending as a percentage of GDP has declined dramatically since 1980. Discretionary spending in absolute terms (adjusted for inflation) declined through the 1990's: http://www.heritage.org/multimedia/infographic/2012/10/feder.... Federal civilian employment is at roughly where it was in the late 1960's: http://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/data-analysis-docum..., even though the overall population is 50% larger. Total federal employment, including military, has been smaller over this decade than it was at any time since 1962. About 2 million fewer people worked for the federal government in 2011 as did in 1969.
The narrative of ever-ballooning government is almost entirely driven by entitlement spending (i.e. me writing a check that gets immediately sent out again as a check to grandma). Now it's a somewhat philosophical question, but I don't think it's accurate to call increased Social Security or Medicare expenditures an "expansion of the state." When I think of the "state" I think of layers of bureaucracy, weapons programs, etc. I.e. money the government has discretionary control over. The long-term trend of that is one of decline, not growth.
"Federal civilian employment is at roughly where it was in the late 1960's"
That OPM report is demonstrably misleading. It doesn't include contract employees which have been increasing since the 80's and have ballooned in the past decade. OPM doesn't keep numbers on the number of contractors. It's also been shown that a contract employee gets paid almost double what a civil servant does for doing the same exact job.[0] Some studies estimate that federal government contractors out number civil servant employees 4 to 1.[1]
Politicians love this because it allows them to say they are holding the line on the size of the federal government in terms of federal employees while it is actually increasing in common sense terms.
It's not any more misleading than counting a guy assembling Humvees or a doctor working on an NIH grant as being employed by the government, and then throwing around figures like 5-7 million additional contractor employees.
Moreover, even according to your link the "true size" of government is shrinking relative to the population. Your source estimates the "true size" of government at 12.6 million in 1990 and 14.6 million in 2005. That's a 16% increase, during a period when U.S. population grew 20% (from 250 million to 300 million), and real GDP grew 63%. And that's a number that reflects the peak of the Iraq/Afghanistan wars, and will decrease as we exit those wars.
Finally, at the end of the day, those contractors are paid out of discretionary expenditures, which are on a long-term downward trend as a percentage of GDP. Your source says: "All of the increase in contract employees is due to increased spending at the Department of Defense." This is the chart of defense spending as a percentage of GDP: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/US_defens...
"It's not any more misleading than counting a guy assembling Humvees or a doctor working on an NIH grant"
Right which is the problem with all numbers seeking to quantify the size of government by a count of the employees. Since good numbers aren't available on the number of contractors that are de facto civil service employees vs employed by an entity that operates autonomously and provides a product to the government.
I don't dispute your argument in terms of dollar amounts.
The chart you give for discretionary spending goes from 1992 ($803) to 2012 ($1289). It shows an overall 60% increase in discretionary spending in only the last 20 years. Not exactly a trend of decline.
The point of that chart was to show that spending decreased in absolute, not just relative, terms in the 1990's, countering the idea that the trajectory is towards inexorable increase. From 1992 to 2012, real GDP growth slightly outpaced discretionary federal expenditures (63% versus 60%).
Moreover, if you look at the chart on page 30-31 of the PDF in the first link, you can see that non-defense + defense expenditures increased from $761 billion FY2012 dollars in 1977 to ~$1,166 billion in 2012 (adding back ~$123 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan that isn't reflected in that chart),[1] an increase of 53% over 35 years. In that time period, U.S. real GDP grew 152% and the U.S. population grew 43%.
To put it in concrete terms, each person in 1977 bore $3,460 of discretionary expenditures while someone in 2012 bore $3,700 of discretionary expenditures. But in 1977 it was 14.2% per-capita income, while in 2012 it was 8.6% of per-capita income.
[1] Note that 1977 was two years after the end of the Vietnam war.
I agree with social security, as it's simply a direct monetary transfer program, and I personally view these, such as progressive taxation, as vastly preferable to Federal control of services for many reasons.
But, Medicare is a state-owned Insurance company, and if I remember correctly, constitutes around 50% of the country's health spending.
Also, Do your numbers include contractors? My understanding is that there is a trend of using contractors in all areas of the federal government, and I personally consider contractors to be defacto federal employees. They have the advantage of not being able to belong to public unions, which I consider anti-democratic, but the disadvantage of losing the sense of being a patriotic public servant participating in the betterment of the Republic.
The numbers do not include contractors, but including the number of contractors in the tally is difficult. Is an engineering working for Lockheed on the F-22 a federal employee? If you take upper-bounds estimates for the number of federal contractors (7-15 million), then he would be considered an employee. But it's not like the federal government wasn't hiring Lockheed to do the same sort of work in 1965.
There are some estimate suggesting that this broader count increased from 12.6 million in 1990 to 14.6 million in 2006: http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2011/jan/06/ge.... This is a 16% increase, but U.S. population grew 20% in that time, and real GDP grew 62% in that time.
I don't disagree with the general sentiment. I think a focus on reducing the size of government is great, and I think it's great that the government is leaner, relative to population and relative to GDP, than it was 20-30 years ago. But throwing your hands-up and saying the inevitable trajectory of government is unbridled growth actually undermines that. If nothing can convince you that government can shrink, and is shrinking, then it makes no sense to continually push to keep a check on the size of government.
Okay, let's go back farther. In 1937 (back in history a third of the lifetime of the republic), expenditures as a percentage of GDP were 8.6% (almost all discretionary; SS was nothing back then and there was no Medicare). In 2011, discretionary expenditures as a percentage of GDP were 9%.
Going back further than that paints a misleading picture. The scope of government increases, super-linearly, with the complexity of the society being governed.[1] Growth that is the result of accommodating a more complex society with exponentially more interaction between people as a result of ever finer-grained division of labor is still growth, but not the kind of growth alluded to in your comment. The growth implied by your comment is steady-state growth: government consumes more until it becomes unsustainable. The fact that government, at least the federal government, has been remarkably consistent in size during the modern industrial era cuts against that narrative.
[1] This is essentially a law of nature, applying to everything from business corporations to operating systems.
> When was the last time anything (large) was defunded by the US congress?
All of those old guys in the NSA will remember when Congress defunded supplying arms to the Nicaraguan Contras and the ensuing Iran-Contra scandal which ended quite a few careers and deeply tarnished even the "teflon" president Reagan.
Even if it get majorities in both houses and signed by the president it wouldn't matter. When was the last time that the executive branch was beholden to congress in matters of national intelligence and security?
Admittedly it is theater but even a symbolic defunding like this can help. If nothing else it is impressive to see that this issue has so much bipartisan traction in the most divided House since before the Civil War.
Just don't use a fixed script, your natural words will have more impact. Keep it short and sweet, "Amash amendment", "to HR 2397", and I'd avoid mentioning the Nugent amendment, e.g. the recipient might accidentally mis-remember what you said and make a mark on the tally for it, or both.
For extra content I think you'd be better pointing out that the "data about" (rather than "metadata) the phone call you're making right then is being recorded by the NSA.
According to Amash, the bill doesn't actually defund anything, but instead aims to end blanket surveillance of Americans by requiring that any records being requested via Section 215 are for 'a person under investigation.'
None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to execute a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order pursuant to section 501 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1861) that does not include the following sentence: "This Order limits the collection of any tangible things (including telephone numbers dialed, telephone numbers of incoming calls, and the duration of calls) that may be authorized to be collected pursuant to this Order to those tangible things that pertain to a person who is the subject of an investigation described in section 501 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1861)."
As I read it the amendment forbids the money appropriated via the bill to be used to collect information on an individual not under investigation via a FISA court order. Fees for blanket orders, like that given to Verizon, cannot be paid with via this bill if the amendment is attached.
If you feel strongly about this, call / email / write your representative and senators. It seems obvious to say, but if you don't, they won't know your opinion.
We need a lot of people in the streets protesting to get meaningful legislation to pass restricting the mass spying activities of the US intelligence system. So far all the efforts seem like shots in the dark. As it is, the politicians will play their standard game of waiting out the uproar.
Americans also need to start thinking about international relations as well. It's an outrage how we've been treating our friends. We should be demanding significant restrictions against international spying as well.
Excuse me, but I seem to recall there was quite a bit of hooey made over "warrentless wiretaps" in the '08 election by the left. Bush lied, and all that noise. Where is the goddamn noise now?
I am wishing that the Left wasn't so full of hypocrites and WOULD actually take to the streets in protest and be the nuisances they normally are. But it's their guy in the WH, and noone likes to admit their guy is a screwup.
Go camp out in a park and defile it with your filth for Justice! Make a big stink, do a #2 on a cop car in protest!
What makes you think Democrats are the "Left?" They are sometimes slightly left wing compared to the Republicans, but on the whole the two major parties are right wing parties. Leftists who support Democrats come up with cowardly excuses about the "lesser of two evils" because they are too terrified that the wrong lizard will win. The rest of us, an unfortunately tiny minority, vote third party.
Excuse me, but I seem to recall there was quite a bit of hooey made over "warrentless wiretaps" in the '08 election by the left. Bush lied, and all that noise. Where is the goddamn noise now?
You're not paying attention. Just about every liberal nexus on the internet is enraged regarding this. Ironically, those who have labeled Snowden as a traitor are generally conservative leaning thinkers, whereas almost every liberal in existence has embraced Snowden as a hero.
I am wishing that the Left wasn't so full of hypocrites and WOULD actually take to the streets in protest and be the nuisances they normally are.
I was half joking in my post, I hope that was clear.
I did not know there were physical protests going on. I suppose the media isn't as willing a partner on this issue and isn't helping to spread the word. Normally, one disgruntled hipster with a bone to pick can make the news, might need to call in the wto hooligans...
Definitely some wagon-circling going on here by those in power who seek to maintain that power.
> "We need a lot of people in the streets protesting to get meaningful legislation to pass restricting the mass spying activities of the US intelligence system. "
That didn't seem to work so well for getting meaningful legislation passed to restrict money in government.
The TV will just push some comparisons to World Peace protests and go on about how they can't figure out what the message is supposed to be and/or how these kids just don't understand how The Real World has to work...
I do think something needs to be done. I don't think that something is to completely dismantle the NSA - that's as reactionary as the PATRIOT act was with regards to 9/11.
The USA has some of their most brilliant crypto/security/intel guys working at the NSA. What happens with them when they are no longer getting paid? They go private I suppose. Is that in the best interest of the country? Or would it make more sense to reign in the NSA and declare the spying illegal, or some other less radical approach that keeps the good guys around and gives them something better to do than record every phone call and text we make?
Most countries have intelligence apparatus of course, no reason the USA shouldn't have something fulfilling the NSA's role.
But if there's one thing this debacle has shown me it's that there's not just a few bad apples playing fast and loose with checks and balances and constitutional safeguards. The rot extends throughout the NSA, the secret courts and secret oversight committees, literally up to the president.
I don't know what form the eventual reforms will take, but if they're going to achieve anything they will have to be extremely extensive. They will have to go well beyond a slap on the wrist for the NSA.
> Most countries have intelligence apparatus of course, no reason the USA shouldn't have something fulfilling the NSA's role.
This isn't terribly compelling to me.
I've never understood why we don't question the validity of both the NSA and the CIA, post-Cold War. Especially when our government just invented an entire war paradigm based on vague threats and the "terrorist" label, which can be applied to anyone the government wants at will.
The old paradigm of state secrets is, IMO, outdated and no longer useful. We should be marching towards total transparency of government. With the Internet and cellphones and cameras everywhere, governments can no longer hide in darkness. They have done very bad things in our name. We know better today, and shouldn't have to accept that this is just the way it is.
I'm sure some of the smartest people in the world would have no trouble finding other better uses of their time. Being afraid of what these guys would do if they went private is a boogeyman type argument, just like this scary "terrorism" stuff the politicians love.
The next logical step in the progression would be to secretly sponsor Communists to suppress the NSA and their sympathizers. In a decade or two if the Commies get out of control, we'll be able to complete the cycle of history by funding al-Qaeda to fight them.
Not to play Big Brother's advocate, but even considering improvised explosive pressure cookers and underwear, I'd wager that 100 NSA snoops bring more of a tactical advantage to this "War on Terror" than 10,000 boots on the ground in Kunar province.
Whether we're achieving anything by wading into that quagmire is another question entirely.
First, every member of the House will need to say whether they support spying on all citizens or not. They are on the clock for re-election in 16 months, less for primaries. Being on record for supporting spying on their electorate will cause more then a few to lose. That's a good thing.
Second, if by some chance the amendment passes the House, then the President can no longer claim he is spying on us with the support of the other two branches of government. He will need to acknowledge that he doesn't have the support of the American people.
Politics is a process. Things don't change in a day. That doesn't mean we should give up or get frustrated. This is a very good step in the long process to change things.