Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the incoming majority leader, encouraged Republicans to block the U.S.A. Freedom Act. Credit J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press
Senate Republicans on Tuesday blocked a sweeping overhaul of the once-secret National Security Agency program that collects records of Americans’ phone calls in bulk.
Democrats and a handful of Republicans who supported the measure fell two votes short of the 60 votes they needed to take up the legislation, which sponsors named the U.S.A. Freedom Act.
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, worked hard to defeat the bill, which had the support of the Obama administration and a coalition of technology companies, including Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.
“This is the worst possible time to be tying our hands behind our backs,†Mr. McConnell said before the vote, expressing the concerns of those who argued that the program was a vital tool in the fight against terrorism.
But the vote only put off a fractious debate over security and personal liberties until next year. While a Republican-controlled Senate is less likely to go along with the kinds of changes that were in the bill, which would have ended the N.S.A.'s ability to collect bulk phone call data, the debate could further expose rifts between the party’s interventionist and more libertarian-leaning wings.
Under the bill, which grew out of the disclosures in June 2013 by Edward J. Snowden, the former intelligence contractor, the N.S.A. would have gotten out of the business of collecting Americans’ phone records in bulk. Instead, most of the records would have stayed in the hands of the phone companies. Analysts would still have been able to perform contact chaining, but they would be required to use a new kind of court order to swiftly obtain only those records that were linked, up to two layers away, to a suspect — even when held by different phone companies.
The bill would not have required phone companies to hold on to the records any longer than they already do for normal business purposes, which in some cases is 18 months.
With the bill’s defeat, the Senate faces a hard deadline for new legislation since the legal basis for the phone records program, a provision of the Patriot Act, expires in June.
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After that, when the 90-day orders to phone companies requiring them to turn over their customers’ records expire, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court would be unable to issue a new round of orders.
The Obama administration, warning of the potential for “brinkmanship and uncertainty†next spring if the bill did not pass, had strongly urged the Senate to support it even though it initially resisted efforts on Capitol Hill to rein in N.S.A. programs.
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