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Mitch McConnell Puts His Finger on the Pulse of the American People

by KCBCorinne Posted on November 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Mitch McConnell says that repealing Obamacare outright is probably unrealistic, but Republicans will nonetheless try to chip away at it:

But with Mr. Obama sure to block any repeal bill passed in the Senate and Republican-controlled House, Mr. McConnell indicated that Senate Republicans will turn their attention to peeling back “pieces of it that are deeply, deeply unpopular with the American people.” He cited the law’s tax on medical devices, its requirement that big employers provide insurance to all workers clocking 30 hours a week or more or pay a fee, and its mandate that most Americans carry insurance or pay a fee.

Let me get this straight. McConnell thinks a 2.3 percent tax on manufacturers and importers of medical devices is deeply, deeply unpopular? He thinks a requirement that employers provide insurance for anyone who works more than 30 hours a week is deeply, deeply unpopular? He thinks the individual mandate is deeply, deeply unpopular?

OK, I’ll give him the last one. The individual mandate is moderately unpopular. Of course, it’s also crucial to the functioning of the law, and McConnell knows perfectly well that Obama won’t allow it to be repealed. So that leaves the device tax and the 30-hour rule. The former is mostly opposed by medical device lobbyists, while the latter is mostly opposed by medium-sized businesses who want the ability to cancel health coverage for workers merely by reducing their workweek to 39 hours. My wild guess is that neither of these things is deeply, deeply unpopular with the American people.

But they are unpopular with interest groups that Republicans care about. So they’re on the chopping block.

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Mitch McConnell Puts His Finger on the Pulse of the American People

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Let the Ass Covering Begin!

by RevaL63sxmlt Posted on November 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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I’m late to this story, but last night I finally got around to reading the big campaign tick-tock in the Washington Post by Philip Rucker and Robert Costa. The part everyone is talking about is the description of bad blood between President Obama and Senate Democrats, and Exhibit A comes via a series of stunningly bitter comments from David Krone, Harry Reid’s chief of staff. Here’s how the reporters managed to put the screws to Krone to get him to talk:

This past Sunday, two days before Election Day, Krone sat at a mahogany conference table in the majority leader’s stately suite just off the Senate floor and shared with Washington Post reporters his notes of White House meetings. Reid’s top aide wanted to show just how difficult he thought it had been to work with the White House.

Look: I get that Obama doesn’t socialize much with congressional Democrats. Even as someone who’s long thought that senators need to get over themselves, there’s no question that this is a real failing of Obama’s. Schmoozing and scheming are part of the president’s job, and if you don’t do it you’re going to end up with a lot of offended allies.

That said, take a look at that highlighted sentence. Apparently David Krone is such an unbelievable asshole that he actively decided to vent all his bitterness and bile to a couple of reporters solely to demonstrate just how hard poor David Krone’s job had been during this election season. He even made sure to bring along his notes to make sure he didn’t forget any of his grievances. As an example of preemptive CYA, this is unequaled in recent memory. To hear him tell the story, Dems would have swept to victory if only Obama had been less of a skinflint and given David Krone more money.

You betcha. Please raise your hand if you think lack of money was even on the top ten list of reasons that Democrats lost this year. Anyone? No?

Then there’s this bit of whinging, which I’ve heard over and over:

Exacerbating matters was Obama’s Oct. 2 speech in Chicago, in which he handed every Republican admaker fresh material that fit perfectly with their message: “I am not on the ballot this fall. . . . But make no mistake — these policies are on the ballot, every single one of them.”

“It took about 12 seconds for every reporter, every race, half of the Obama world to say that was probably not the right thing to say,” said a senior Democratic official. It was so problematic that many Democrats wondered whether Obama meant to say it. He did. “It is amazing that it was in the speech,” the official said. “It wasn’t ad-libbed.”

Good God. Are Democrats really delusional enough to convince themselves that this made even the slightest difference? Aside from the fact that virtually no one outside the political junkie community heard this speech, who cares anyway? Republicans had long since made the election all about Obama and his policies, and it didn’t matter a whit whether Obama acknowledged this or not. The GOP attack ads were going to be same either way. If anything, the truth is that Dems might have been better off if they’d been more willing to face the reality Obama tried to warn them about: that this election was about Obama’s policies whether anyone liked it or not. Instead of cowering in their corners, they needed to figure out a way to deal with this.

Obama has made plenty of mistakes over the past year. The healthcare.gov rollout was obviously a debacle that hurt Democrats. Foreign policy has been occasionally tone deaf, even if it’s been substantively fairly solid. The flip-flop on immigration was inept. But Obama has raised plenty of money. He’s been willing to either campaign or keep his distance as circumstances dictate. His relatively low approval ratings obviously hurt Democrats, but he was far from their biggest problem. They better face up to that sometime soon.

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Let the Ass Covering Begin!

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Wendy Davis Spent $36 Million and All She Got Was This Lousy Landslide. Now What?

by Myron83Nao Posted on November 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Oops. Last year, fresh from a presidential reelection campaign in which it was hailed for its 21st-century tactics and organizing prowess, a group of Obama for America veterans descended on Texas with the goal of turning the state purple. They launched a new group, Battleground Texas, raised millions from wealthy donors, and teamed up with a rising Democratic star running for statewide office. What happened next will…probably not shock you.

In the first test-drive for Battleground Texas, Democrats got trounced, losing every statewide race for the 16th consecutive election. In the much-hyped governor’s race, state Sen. Wendy Davis lost to Attorney General Greg Abbott by 21 points. She fared only two points better than the sacrificial lamb running for agriculture commissioner, who didn’t campaign at all. But Republicans didn’t just fend off Davis, or rile up their base against a Democrat whom activists mocked as “abortion Barbie”—they ran up the score, and did so in all the places where Democrats were supposed to take baby steps.

When Battleground Texas first launched, 2014 was considered too much, too soon. But when Davis entered the race, fresh off of an 11-hour filibuster of an anti-abortion bill, the calculus changed. The group merged its offices with Davis’ gubernatorial campaign, set about building an army of 34,000 canvassers, lawyers, and voter-registration volunteers, and looked to pick off low-hanging fruit wherever it could.

The idea was that an Obama-style organizing operation could make a real impact in down-ballot races, which are traditionally less sophisticated. It didn’t.

Battleground invested in a dozen state-legislature races, targeting House and Senate districts that will have to turn purple for anyone at the top of the ticket to have a chance—East Dallas, the Houston suburbs, and a South Texas seat held by a party-switching state represenative. Democrats didn’t win a single one, and most of the races weren’t even close. In Harris County (Houston), where Democrats talked of tapping into the roughly 800,000 nonregistered potential voters, Davis lost by four points. (The Dem’s 2010 nominee, Bill White, won it by two.) In the final indignity, Democrats even lost Davis’ state Senate seat to a pro-life tea party Republican.

“Tonight’s decisive victory proves they picked the wrong battleground,” boasted GOP state Sen. Dan Patrick, who won the race for lieutenant governor by 19 points, despite an almost concerted effort to alienate Hispanic voters. (He warned, at one point, that child migrants might bring Ebola with them across the border.)

Soon-to-be-Senator Abbott had a low bar to clear, and he did so easily. Davis hammered him for comparing law enforcement corruption in heavily Hispanic South Texas to that of a “Third-world country,” and for refusing to say whether, as attorney general, he would hypothetically defend a hypothetical Texas law banning interracial marriage. (Abbott’s wife, Cecilia, is Mexican-American.) His simple response was to show up in South Texas and campaign seriously. It paid off: Abott won 44 percent of Latino voters, according to exit polling—including a plurality of Latino men.

And, in a sprawling, heavily Hispanic district that stretches from San Antonio to El Paso, Republicans unseated Democratic Rep. Pete Gallego. His replacement: Will Hurd, a former CIA agent who will be Texas’ first black Republican congressman since Reconstruction.

One silver lining for Battleground Texas is that no one was even running in some of these races two years ago. On Wednesday, the organization released a detailed memo from Senior Adviser Jeremy Bird and Executive Director Jenn Brown outlining their accomplishments and vowing to fight on: “We said from the beginning that turning Texas into a battleground will take time and commitment—and we’re just getting started.” Among their wins: a more potent fundraising operation, a growing voter database, and a nugget from the exit polls: higher percentages of young voters, women voters, and minority voters than in 2010.

But the voters just weren’t going for Davis. Even though Battleground boasted of having trained 8,700 new voter-registration volunteers, the overall voter turnout dropped by 300,000 from 2010. Absent any sort of marquee victory to call its own, the fate of Battleground is now outside its control. Texas Democrats won’t have another big election for four years—plenty of time to lose interest—and, well, something else might come up in the interim.

When I dropped by the group’s Fort Worth headquarters in September, I asked director Brown if she’d consider leaving her post to work for Hillary Clinton’s almost certain presidential campaign. She laughed and looked down at the mostly blank paper in front of her.

“The most important thing about Battleground Texas is that it is a Texas-run organization,” she said. “It’s not about me—I just am lucky to be a part of it, so I actually think no matter who runs it, whether it’s me or something else, ultimately, we don’t actually run the organization.”

So, Battleground took a shellacking in its first test run. Now comes the hard part.

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Wendy Davis Spent $36 Million and All She Got Was This Lousy Landslide. Now What?

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Pat Roberts Avoids Being The Only Senate Republican To Lose In 2014

by NelsonIZJE Posted on November 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) on Tuesday avoided the indignity of becoming the only GOP incumbent senator to lose his seat in the 2014 midterm elections. The Associated Press called the race for Roberts at 11:10 p.m. ET.

Roberts was dogged from the start by evidence that he lived in suburban Virginia and not in the state he represented in Congress. (His listed residence in Kansas was a home that belonged to two supporters.) He overcame a spirited challenge by a tea-party-backed doctor named Milton Wolf in the GOP primary. And then Roberts, who is 78, battled back from a sizable deficit against independent Greg Orman, a businessman who conveyed an anti-Washington message and refused to say which party he’d caucus with if elected.

The Kansas Senate race got even more interesting in September, when the Democrat on the ticket, Chad Taylor, dropped out, leaving only Orman and Roberts in the race. Polls at the time showed Orman with as much as a 10-point lead.

When Roberts’ vulnerability against Orman became apparent earlier this fall, Roberts’ campaign staff was replaced with prominent Republican strategists. Reinforcements in the form of outside money swooped in, painting Orman as a Democrat in disguise and as an Obama ally. (Orman had previously made a brief run for Congress on the Democratic ticket.) The constant attacks on Orman paid off, and Roberts has now secured his fourth term in the US Senate.

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Pat Roberts Avoids Being The Only Senate Republican To Lose In 2014

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Obamacare Could Have Turned Millions of Uninsured Americans Into Voters

by Billy Jobs Posted on November 4, 2014

Mother Jones

Since the 2010 midterm elections, Republican-controlled legislatures in 21 states have made it harder to vote, enacting restrictions on early voting, ending same-day registration, and requiring government-issued ID at the polls. Many of these measures have been found to reduce turnout among poorer and minority voters.

Meanwhile, the Affordable Care Act provided President Barack Obama with a tool that could have helped counter the effect of the new laws restricting voting and made it easier for non-white voters to get to the polls. But he decided not to use it.

The 1993 National Voter Registration Act, also known as the Motor Voter law, requires that departments of motor vehicles and other public assistance agencies provide voter registration services. According to HHS, the health insurance exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act count as public assistance agencies under the statute. That means that the assistants who walk uninsured Americans through the exchange’s insurance sign-up process should also have to offer to guide applicants through the voter registration process. While HHS can’t directly control compliance at the state-run health exchanges, the agency can ensure that assistants who help the uninsured sign up for coverage on the federal exchange—called navigators—provide voters with step-by-step guidance on registering to vote. But that hasn’t been happening.

Voting rights advocates have been pressuring HHS for more than a year to reverse course and make sure navigators fully comply with the Motor Voter law. But since a backlash last year by Republicans, the administration has demurred. So the more than 5.4 million uninsured Americans who have signed up for insurance at healthcare.gov since October 1, 2013 have not received extra assistance in registering to vote. Thirty-seven percent of the enrollees who chose to report their ethnicity were minorities.

Lawrence Jacobs, a political science professor at the University of Minnesota and author of Health Care Reform and American Politics, told me earlier this year that the administration is “running from a political fight”:

GOP opposition to signing up new voters through the health insurance exchanges has been fierce. Right-wing talk show yeller Rush Limbaugh said in June that it shows “the purpose of Obamacare… It’s about building a permanent, undefeatable, always-funded Democrat majority.” In March, Republicans on the House Ways and Means committee worried about how Obama-friendly “associations like the now-defunct ACORN”—such as FamiliesUSA and AARP that the administration will fund to help sign up the uninsured—would use applicants’ voting information. Rep. Charles Boustany (R-La.) wrote a letter to HHS this past spring, charging that the health care law “does not give your Department an interest in whether individual Americans choose to vote,” and asking HHS to provide justification for including voter registration questions in health insurance applications.

The Presidential Commission on Election Administration, which Obama created last year to assess voting problems around the country, released a study in January calling for better enforcement of government agencies’ compliance with the Motor Voter law, noting that it was “the election statute most often ignored.”

While the federal exchange website provides a link to the federal voter registration website as part of the health insurance application process, advocates say the department has failed to ensure that navigators automatically offer people who need help with their insurance application aid with voter registration applications as well. “It’s likely that many thousands of citizens would have applied to register to vote if the administration had complied,” says Lisa Danetz, the legal director at the think-tank Demos. “And we know that once registered, people turn out to vote at a relatively good rate.”

It’s not too late for the administration to use Obamacare to help Americans register to vote. Another 10 million uninsured Americans are expected to obtain coverage through the Affordable Care Act in 2015, and more than 24 million a year are expected to sign up 2015 and 2016.

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Obamacare Could Have Turned Millions of Uninsured Americans Into Voters

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This Veteran Is Tired of Being Thanked for His Service

by PattiHeighway Posted on November 3, 2014

Mother Jones

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Last week, in a quiet indie bookstore on the north side of Chicago, I saw the latest issue of Rolling Stone resting on a chrome-colored plastic table a few feet from a barista brewing a vanilla latte. A cold October rain fell outside. A friend of mine grabbed the issue and began flipping through it. Knowing that I was a veteran, he said, “Hey, did you see this?” pointing to a news story that seemed more like an ad. It read in part:

“This Veterans Day, Bruce Springsteen, Eminem, Rihanna, Dave Grohl, and Metallica will be among numerous artists who will head to the National Mall in Washington DC on November 11th for ‘The Concert For Valor,’ an all-star event that will pay tribute to armed services.”

“Concert For Valor? That sounds like something the North Korean government would organize,” I said as I typed Concertforvalor.com into my MacBook Pro looking for more information.

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This Veteran Is Tired of Being Thanked for His Service

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8 Candidates We Can’t Believe Might Actually Win

by MarquitPFR Posted on November 3, 2014

Mother Jones

On Tuesday, tens of millions of Americans will brave long lines and various precipitates to elect the public servants that best represent their democratic values. For better or for worse. Here’s a quick guide to the candidates we can’t believe might actually win—whether because of legal troubles, crushing hypocrisy, basic math, or some combination thereof. It is by no means comprehensive.

Rep. Don young (R-AlaskA)

Bill Roth/TNS/ZUMA

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8 Candidates We Can’t Believe Might Actually Win

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Republicans Tried to Suppress the Black Vote in North Carolina. It’s Not Working.

by BonitaYuranigh Posted on October 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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“The first question I ask my customers is: Are you registered?” Jolanda Smith says.

Smith runs a hair salon on the outskirts of Fayetteville, North Carolina. Her hair is dyed lavender and her arms are covered in heart and shooting-star tattoos. In the lead-up to the midterms, she’s lending her storefront to Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan’s reelection campaign. Smith passes out sample ballots and flyers and tells customers how to register and where their polling location is. Last Saturday morning, she was talking God and voting as she straightened a customer’s hair.

“It’s: Are you gonna vote, yes or no?” she says, sectioning off a lock of hair and pulling it through the iron. “God gave us a choice, and the choices are always yes or no. It’s not maybe. It’s not, ‘Let me think about it,’ ’cause those are excuses…on down from choosing Christ to voting. You gonna vote? Yes or no?”

IN 2013, North Carolina Republicans, led by Hagan’s opponent, state house speaker Thom Tillis, passed a far-reaching voting law that curtails early voting and eliminates same-day registration. The Justice Department sued North Carolina over the law, charging it was discriminatory and would depress minority turnout.

Hagan’s campaign knows that black voter turnout could decide her fate—and, by extension, determine which party controls the Senate for the final two years of President Barack Obama’s term. If African-Americans manage to turn out at presidential-year levels—if they’re at least 21 percent of the electorate—Hagan will probably win, says Tom Jensen, director of the North Carolina-based polling firm Public Policy Polling.

That’s why the Hagan campaign, and its coordinated get-out-the-vote organization Forward North Carolina—along with the NAACP, state Democrats, and get-out-the-vote outfits—launched unprecedented efforts this year to mobilize black voters.

Those efforts are paying off. On the first day of early voting last week, 76-year-old Ruben Betts was sitting on the curb in a shopping center parking lot wearing an “I just voted” sticker on his sweater. The president reminded him to vote this year, he says: “Obama sent me a letter.” As of Thursday, 24 percent of early voters in North Carolina were African-American, according to records from the state board of elections. That’s up from just 17 percent at the same point during the last midterm elections in 2010.

The Hagan field operation, which has 40 offices, 100 staffers, and 10,000 volunteers, is the largest that North Carolina has ever seen in a Senate race. By comparison, the get-out-the-vote campaign for North Carolina Secretary of State Elaine Marshall’s failed Senate bid in 2010 was almost entirely run by volunteers. “We had no money, I mean no money,” says Thomas Mills, a Democratic political consultant who helped coordinate Marshall’s field operation. “And maybe five paid staffers. The difference in what they’ve got now—it’s just not even same thing. There’s no comparison.”

Democrats have spent $1 million on ads aired on black radio stations. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee partnered with the Congressional Black Caucus this month to send black lawmakers on a bus tour through North Carolina and five other battleground states. And Hagan’s campaign is collaborating extensively with black clergy across the state and roughly 150 black small business owners like Smith who are helping turn out voters this year.

Smith says the main issue that convinces her customers to go to the polls is health insurance. (North Carolina didn’t expand Medicaid, so about 500,000 poor North Carolinians are still without insurance.) Jobs top the list, too. Smith’s shop sits on Murchison Road, one of the main drags leading out of Fayetteville. The further you drive from the town center, the less money there is—the storefronts become more faded, the sidewalks get weedier, the landscape grayer. “It’s hard to get a job even if you have a degree,” she says.

Smith adds that anger over the August shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, will also bring people in her community out on Tuesday. “It was more than just him,” she notes, referring to the police brutality she witnesses regularly in her community. “You have some in the system that say, ‘I’m gonna hide behind this badge and use it for injustice instead of justice’…To us it feels like it’s racist.”

T-omnis Cox says he feels like a potential Michael Brown. A 23-year-old who works at a chicken plant in eastern North Carolina, he was hanging out in front of a corner liquor store in Goldsboro last Thursday evening. “It’s hard out here in the world,” he says. “Every day, we’re ducking from cops, we’re ducking from law.” Cox says he’s going to vote for Hagan because “Republicans don’t care about the poor.”

Hagan’s campaign has also reached out to African-American churches as a key component of its voter mobilization effort, urging pastors around the state to help with voter education and registration.

The Rev. Dumas Alexander Harshaw Jr. says his church in downtown Raleigh, First Baptist—which was founded by freed slaves—has always been political. This election cycle, the church has been helping voters register, and handing out sample ballots as well as guidelines on how and where to vote. Last Sunday, Harshaw invited Dr. Everett Ward, the president of St. Augustine’s University, a historically black college in the city, to speak to the members of First Baptist about voting.

“We’ve seen this movie before,” Ward tells the congregation, referring to the slew of policies Tillis and his fellow Republicans in the state Legislature have enacted since 2012 that disproportionately harm minorities. “It had the same title in 1895, in 1958, in 1968: ‘The South Shall Rise Again.'” A few amens rise from the pews. If North Carolina sends Tillis to Washington, Ward continues, “we will lose more opportunity for upward mobility, access to healthcare will disappear, access to higher education will disappear.”

So go vote, he says. “Throughout history…When our people faced discrimination and injustice, we answered the call.”

“Will you go?” Ward asks the congregation, and the chapel fills with “Yes.” “Will you go?” “Yes.”

Not everyone needs to be convinced to exercise their civic duty. “People died so I might have the right to vote,” says Mary Bethel, who is lending her Fayetteville storefront to Hagan’s ground campaign. Last Friday afternoon, she sat at her desk among stacks of papers, envelopes, Post-its and grandchild photos in her small tax shop on Murchison Road, wearing bright red lipstick and lightly smudged glasses. “My parents voted til the day they died,” she adds. “I grew up in segregation. I vote every election.”

Tillis’ record as A leader of the unpopular state Legislature has made it easier for people like Smith and Ward to get black voters to the polls. “Kay Hagan, to me she’s wishy-washy, she’s two-faced. But Tillis is an out-out crook,” says Michael Curtis, a 65-year-old unemployed former construction worker who lives in Raleigh. Democrats haven’t done much for Curtis—he’s been out of a job since Obama was elected, and says he doesn’t have health care—but he’s still voting Hagan. Last year, Tillis voted against expanding Medicaid in North Carolina, which would have provided coverage to a half million uninsured North Carolinians. Tillis led a GOP push to cut funding for substance abuse treatment centers by 12 percent. In 2013, he and his fellow Republicans slashed unemployment benefits for 170,000 North Carolinians and eliminated the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit, while cutting taxes for rich people. And Tillis backed the harsh voter suppression law, too.

These bills and others Tillis and fellow Republicans forced through after they took control of both the legislature and the governorship in 2012 led the NAACP’s Rev. William Barber to launch the Moral Mondays movement in April 2013. For 74 straight weeks now, protesters have held demonstrations near the state capitol demanding a retreat from the state’s sharp right turn.

Now the NAACP is harnessing that anger to get voters to the polls in the most massive mobilization effort the group has ever made in a non-presidential year. Last Thursday, the first day of early voting in the state, the NAACP led 32 marches to the polls—more than in any previous midterm year. Barber’s organization is also calling all of the 286,000 African-Americans who voted in 2012 and 2008 but didn’t vote in 2010, helping register thousands of new voters, buying radio ads, and reaching out to churches. “African-Americans need to vote because we’re the ones who know the most about voter suppression,” Barber told Mother Jones.

If Hagan loses, though, it won’t be African-Americans’ fault. It will be because too many centrist Democrats voted Republican, Barber says. There are 800,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans in North Carolina, many of whom are white. “You don’t lay the blame of this election on black people.”

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Republicans Tried to Suppress the Black Vote in North Carolina. It’s Not Working.

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Facebook Wants You to Vote on Tuesday. Here’s How It Messed With Your Feed in 2012.

by TarahMunzd Posted on October 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Election Day, political campaigns, candidates, consultants, and pollsters pay close attention to who votes and why—and so does Facebook. For the past six years, on every national Election Day, the social-networking behemoth has pushed out a tool—a high-profile button that proclaims “I’m Voting” or “I’m a Voter”—designed to encourage Facebook users to vote. Now, Facebook says it has finished fine-tuning the tool, and if all goes according to plan, on Tuesday many of its more than 150 million American users will feel a gentle but effective nudge to vote, courtesy of Mark Zuckerberg & Co. If past research is any guide, up to a few million more people will head to the polls partly because their Facebook friends encouraged them.

Yet the process by which Facebook has developed this tool—what the firm calls the “voter megaphone”—has not been very transparent, raising questions about its use and Facebook’s ability to influence elections. Moreover, while Facebook has been developing and promoting this tool, it has also been quietly conducting experiments on how the company’s actions can affect the voting behavior of its users.

In particular, Facebook has studied how changes in the news feed seen by its users—the constant drip-drip-drip of information shared by friends that is heart of their Facebook experience—can affect their level of interest in politics and their likelihood of voting. For one such experiment, conducted in the three months prior to Election Day in 2012, Facebook increased the amount of hard news stories at the top of the feeds of 1.9 million users. According to one Facebook data scientist, that change—which users were not alerted to—measurably increased civic engagement and voter turnout.

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Facebook Wants You to Vote on Tuesday. Here’s How It Messed With Your Feed in 2012.

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In NSA Bills, the Devil Is in the Details

by ReginalJobe Posted on October 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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Sen. Patrick Leahy says that his USA FREEDOM bill will stop the NSA’s bulk collection of phone data. H.L. Pohlman says it’s not quite that easy:

In Presidential Policy Directive (PPD-28) issued in January 2014, the Obama administration defined “bulk collection” as the acquisition “of large quantities of signals intelligence data which . . . is acquired without the use of discriminants (e.g., specific identifiers, selection terms, etc.).” Thus, as long as the government uses a “discriminant,” a selection term, no matter how broad that term might be, the government is not engaged in a “bulk collection” program.

….The USA FREEDOM Act does not guarantee, then, that the government’s database of telephone metadata will be smaller than it is now. It all depends on the generality of the selection terms that the government will use to obtain metadata from the telephone companies. And we don’t know what those terms will be.

This is a longstanding issue that’s been brought up by lots of people lots of times. It’s not some minor subtlety. If the government decides to look for “all calls from the 213 area code,” that’s not necessarily bulk collection even though it would amass millions of records. It would be up to a judge to decide.

If and when we get close to Congress actually considering bills to rein in the NSA—about which I’m only modestly optimistic in the first place—this is going to be a key thing to keep an eye on. As the ACLU and the EFF and others keep reminding us, reining in the NSA isn’t a simple matter of “ending” their bulk collection program. The devil is truly in the details, and tiny changes in wording can literally mean the difference between something that works and something that’s useless. Or maybe even worse than useless. As Pohlman points out, if you choose the right words, the NSA could end up having a freer hand than they do today. This is something to pay close attention to.

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In NSA Bills, the Devil Is in the Details

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