The New Yorker (Opinion):
By Ryan Lizza
November 30, 2015
June
2, 2015, Congress did something that it rarely does: it passed a law.
The U.S.A. Freedom Act, which had passed the House in May, cleared the
Senate, and President
Obama signed it the same day. Though few considered it perfect, the
bill was a rare example of how Congress should work. In 2013, Edward
Snowden had revealed that the N.S.A. was collecting the phone records of
nearly all Americans and assembling the information
into a massive database, in which the calling patterns of suspected
terrorists could theoretically be uncovered. Civil libertarians—and at
least one federal court—argued that the program was illegal and probably
unconstitutional. Public concerns about the
program forced Obama to modify the way it was run and triggered
hearings in Congress, which drafted a reform bill.
The
product, the U.S.A. Freedom Act, was hardly a radical piece of
legislation. As of Sunday, the government is no longer supposed to
collect essentially every American’s
phone records. Telephone companies will now retain the data, and the
government will be required to get a court order to collect information
on a suspect’s number. Civil-liberties organizations, like the A.C.L.U.,
which endorsed an early version of the bill,
decided that the final version had been so weakened during the
legislative process, in order to win over Republicans, that it was no
longer worth supporting. Still, the legislation made the N.S.A. program
more accountable to Congress, and more transparent.
The
N.S.A. bill passed by a wide margin in both chambers—also a rare event
in Washington. The House vote was 303–121, and the Senate vote was
67–32. Twenty-two Republican
Senators voted for it. One of the surprising yes votes on the
Republican side was Ted Cruz, who not only supported the bill but was
one of its nine original co-sponsors, a group of five Democrats
(including Chuck Schumer, of New York) and four Republicans.
Since
he arrived in the Senate, in 2013, Cruz has not been known as an
effective legislator. He has alienated Republican colleagues and aligned
himself with a strand of
anti-government conservatism that sometimes seems hostile to the act of
legislating itself. But he boasted that he was “proud” of this
particular vote. “The USA FREEDOM Act is the right policy approach,” he
said in a statement when it passed. “It protects
the civil liberties of every American. It ends the federal government’s
bulk collection of personal data from law-abiding citizens. And at the
same time it ensures that we maintain the tools that are needed to
target violent terrorists and prevent acts of
terror.”
Two
years earlier, in June of 2013, the Senate also seemed to work, if for a
brief moment. It passed the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and
Immigration Modernization
Act, commonly known as comprehensive immigration reform. One of the
chief architects of that bill was Marco Rubio, who labored for months to
put together a bipartisan coalition and forge a workable compromise
that included the Democratic priority, of a path
to citizenship for most undocumented immigrants living in the United
States, and the Republican priority, of enhanced border security to keep
new waves of undocumented immigrants out of the country. His efforts
paid off with an impressive 68–32 vote in the
Senate, but the bill was never taken up in the House because
conservatives there rebelled against it. Rubio’s immigration bill, even
though it never passed, was arguably his biggest achievement as a
senator.
Now
Cruz and Rubio are locked in a battle against each other as they court
the Republican primary electorate in their runs for President. Each is
seizing on the other’s
legislative accomplishment as evidence that his opponent is a dangerous
sellout to the conservative cause. On November 16th, three days after
the terrorist attacks in Paris, Rubio said that Cruz had “voted to
weaken the U.S. intelligence programs.” American
Encore, a group that supports Rubio, quickly adopted the same line and
is now running an ad in Iowa alleging that Cruz “voted to weaken
America’s ability to identify and hunt down terrorists.”
When
reporters asked Cruz about the ad on Saturday, he responded by turning
the conversation to immigration and Rubio’s prominent role working with
Democrats and the White
House. “Senator Rubio’s campaign has been desperate to change the topic
from his longtime partnership with and collaboration with President
Obama and Chuck Schumer in pushing a massive amnesty bill,” Cruz said.
Politically,
it’s not entirely clear who has the upper hand in this fight.
Immigration reform seems like a more toxic issue for conservatives than
the N.S.A.’s metadata
program, which has long had strong critics in the libertarian wing of
the Party—although, obviously, national-security issues are now
dominating the public debate. And Cruz seems slightly more comfortable
defending his N.S.A.-reform vote than Rubio does defending
his immigration-reform vote; on Saturday, Cruz also said that Rubio was
afraid of “the criticism that he has received that he is not willing to
protect the Fourth Amendment privacy rights of law-abiding citizens.”
But while the politics are unclear, the implications
for governance are more obvious.
Numerous
governors have already dropped out of the race, candidates who, despite
their flaws, ran large states and were reëlected by voters: Scott
Walker, of Wisconsin;
Bobby Jindal, of Louisiana; Rick Perry, of Texas. The governors still
in the race—Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida; Mike Huckabee, the
former governor of Arkansas; John Kasich, the governor of Ohio; and
Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey—are
struggling.
It
now appears that we are entering a period of the campaign in which the
two Republican senators who may have the best shot at unseating the
front-runner, Donald Trump,
and winning their party’s nomination are veering into a potential
murder-suicide pact over who was more complicit in actually trying to
get something accomplished in Washington. The lesson for any senator who
aspires to higher office is clear, and depressing:
it’s safer to do nothing at all than it is to try to solve a big
problem.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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