"This mess is an entirely predictable consequence of Senator McConnell’s bad habit of governing by manufactured crisis ..."

...................................................................................................................................................................
N.S.A. and Other Matters Leave McConnell’s Senate in Disarray
By Jennifer Steinhauer and Jonathan Weisman, May 23, 2015

The sleepy United States senators thought they were done voting. But then, around 1 a.m. on the Saturday before Memorial Day, Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky and presidential candidate, marched spryly to the Senate floor to let it be known that, no, he would not agree to extend the federal government’s bulk collection of phone records program. Not even for one day.

With that, Senator Mitch McConnell, a fellow Kentucky Republican who only a few hours before was ebullient with the passage of a major trade package, was reduced to ordering his colleagues back to Washington next Sunday to try again to prevent the act from expiring.

The unexpected legislative collapse on the Senate floor, and Mr. McConnell’s morose departure, pointed up the quandary that has emerged since Republicans took control.

They have had successes, like passage of the hard-fought bill that could pave the way to the largest trade agreement in a generation and a bill to give Congress a voice in the Iran nuclear negotiations. And more senators are allowed to try to influence legislation through amendments, which Mr. McConnell’s Democratic predecessor as majority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, prevented.

But as senators raced for the airport on Saturday after a six-week session that ended in disarray, they left behind a wreck of promises made by Mr. McConnell on how a renewed Senate would operate. Mr. McConnell has found himself vexed by Democratic delaying tactics he honed in the minority, five presidential aspirants with their own agendas and a new crop of conservative firebrands demanding their say.

Mr. McConnell promised that his party would instill more discipline, avoiding the last-minute legislative cliffhangers that have long marked Congress and left government workers and the capital markets in a state of constant unease. Instead, he allowed the Senate to depart with a key national security program dangling on the precipice of extinction. Senators also failed again to find a long-term solution for fixing the nation’s crumbling roads.

Mr. McConnell promised that, unlike Mr. Reid, he would let bills enjoy a “strong and robust” amendment process, with senators from both parties given a voice on all legislation. Yet in some cases, as in a measure to give Congress a say in any global deal on Iran’s nuclear program, Mr. McConnell’s efforts were felled by his own party. And in the case of trade, Democrats felt that a promise of an amendment buffet was really little more than a small snack.

Mr. McConnell vowed that committee work would replace back-room deals on major legislation, although the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone records — which falls under the jurisdiction of two committees — was never the subject of a public hearing or a formal drafting of a bill.

With the N.S.A. vote, Mr. McConnell made a series of errors: choosing to do the trade bill first instead of dealing with the looming statutory deadline on the surveillance measure; failing to appreciate Mr. Paul’s zeal for — and fund-raising efforts from — the privacy issue; and underestimating the power of the rest of his presidential caucus.

Mr. Paul had been using his stand against any extension of the Patriot Act’s phone-records dragnet as a campaign tool all week. When he took to the Senate floor on Wednesday to speak for 10 and a half hours, describing what he said were the evils of government surveillance, his campaign was simultaneously hawking fund-raising souvenirs (“Get your Rand Paul filibuster starter pack!”).

With another Republican presidential aspirant, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, visibly rolling his eyes, Mr. Paul and his allies took to the Senate floor around 1 a.m. Saturday to object to a series of brief extensions proposed for the Patriot Act: seven days, four days, two days, even one day.

That bit of theatrics came in large part because Mr. McConnell’s vaunted restoration of the committee process had so badly broken down.

Mr. McConnell had promised that the Senate would largely cease its habit of jamming through legislation worked out between congressional leaders and go back to committees writing bills. While the House — as of late the more dysfunctional legislative body in America — managed to do just that, in the Senate, neither the Judiciary nor the Intelligence Committee had a public hearing on bulk data collection.

Senator Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, chairman of the Intelligence Committee, chose to bypass his own members and team up with Mr. McConnell to offer a bill that would have extended the program for five years.

But both men realized that their idea had so little support that they never even bothered to take it to the floor, instead opting for a two-month extension that failed. Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, withdrew himself from the process, leaving Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, to operate as if he were still the chairman, working with Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, to push the House measure.

“Although we have known these sunsets were coming for years, the Republican leadership in the Senate has done nothing this year on this urgent matter,” Mr. Leahy said.

The committee dysfunction is explained away by some lawmakers as reflecting a longstanding conflict between those two committees, with Judiciary concerned with legal and privacy issues and Intelligence concerned with the security issues.

“The work product that came out of the Judiciary Committee was something both Republicans and Democrats were comfortable with,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

Representative Devin Nunes, Republican of California and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, was unsparing in his frustration on Saturday. “This whole argument is just a circus act, and it’s just unfortunate,” he said. “We’ve wasted a considerable amount of legislative time.”

The collapse was not all Mr. McConnell’s fault. Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, noted that the majority leader had been trying for two months to get legislation on the Senate floor to extend the president’s so-called trade promotion authority, which would help President Obama complete a major trade accord with Pacific Rim nations.

But Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the ranking Democrat on the Finance Committee, repeatedly pushed off trade action.

Once the trade bill reached the floor, Democrats used the same tactics Republicans had when they were in the minority to stop the Senate in its tracks. They proposed 150 amendments. By Thursday, they had whittled them down to 38. By Friday, the total was at 20. For Republicans, that was much too much. In one full week of debate, seven amendments came to a vote. Two passed.

The mess gave Democratic leaders what they badly wanted: a chance to say, “I told you so.”

“This mess is an entirely predictable consequence of Senator McConnell’s bad habit of governing by manufactured crisis,” Adam Jentleson, a spokesman for Mr. Reid, said Saturday. “Senator McConnell set several bills on a collision course without any real plan to resolve the inevitable pileup.”
...................................................................................................................................................................