Heller joins bipartisan coalition to stall extension of Patriot Act

By Karoun Demirjian

Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2011 | 6:55 p.m.

The House came up seven votes shy of extending the Patriot Act on Tuesday night, after a small band of Republicans, including Nevada’s Dean Heller, struck out from their party’s leadership, keeping the reauthorization attempt on ice.

Without a change in strategy, provisions of the law that allow federal agencies to delve into business records, conduct wiretaps, and conduct surveillance of targets not necessarily tied to a terrorist group will expire at the end of the month.

Congress passed the Patriot Act in 2005 as a way of helping the federal government police against terrorism and other homeland security threats more ably. But even before it became the law, the act caused consternation over whether it’s now too easy for the government to reach into people’s lives, ignoring individuals’ rights to privacy.

Those concerns led 26 Republicans, most of the them freshmen, to break rank against the House’s GOP leadership and vote against extending provisions of the Patriot Act until December 8, 2011.

The position isn’t a new one for Heller — he opposed extending the Patriot Act last year, too.

And it’s not just Republicans that oppose it, of course. While the Obama administration supports an extension, more House Democrats opposed it (122) than supported it (67). They too, argue that the bill’s provisions ride roughshod over basic American freedoms and don’t actually deliver the government enough benefit to make continuing the program worthwhile.

It’s not often that the Republicans’ staunchest conservatives and the Democrats’ most progressive liberals unite to form such a coalition to bring down a bill. The defeat was, for Republican leaders, somewhat unexpected: the GOP’s top ranked held the vote open for an extra 20 minutes past regulation time to try to persuade members to change their votes and pass the bill but weren’t successful in building enough of a supermajority.

While most House members still voted in favor of the bill — the vote was 277-148 — the bill failed to earn a 2/3 majority. That’s a requirement for bills that are brought to a vote under the suspension calendar, a procedural designation that means the bill can’t be amended but has to gain a much bigger majority to pass.

With the deadline for the programs’ expiration date fast approaching, the House is expected to try the bill again in the next few weeks. But if they go for what it appears they now need — a simple majority — it potentially opens up the bill to be amended.

Simple straight up-and-down majority votes in the House come up under what’s known as a rule; if the rule is open, it’s open season for amendments, but if it’s closed, the Rules Committee, led by California Republican David Dreier, who voted for the Patriot Act extension, gets to pick what stays and what goes.