The failed Amash amendment and the shifting politics of national security

On Wednesday night, we were reminded once again that national security politics makes for really strange bedfellows. After a lively debate, the House narrowly defeated an amendment to a defense spending bill that would have curbed the National Security Agency's authority to indiscriminately collect Americans' telephone metadata.

The amendment, sponsored by Reps. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) and John Conyers (D-Mich.), split the House along unusual ideological lines. "The strongest backers of the measure were an oil-and-water mix of deeply conservative Tea Party Republicans and some of the chamber's most liberal Democrats," say Ken Dilanian and Michael A. Memoli in the Los Angeles Times.

Ninety-four Republicans and 111 Democrats voted for the Amash amendment, and 134 Republicans and 83 Democrats voted it down. (The final vote was 217 against and 205 in favor.) House leaders from both parties and almost the entire House Intelligence Committee voted against it. The amendment would have restricted the NSA by only allowing it to collect phone metadata — the phone numbers, date, time, and durations of calls — from people it identifies as under investigation.

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Wednesday night's vote "was the first real test of political sentiment since former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents that revealed the secret program," says David Rogers at Politico. And for the intelligence community and its supporters in Congress, "the narrowness of the vote was a jolting reminder of the emotions stirred by the issue."

The politics here are very odd. The White House lobbied hard against the measure, as did Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander — both intelligence chiefs met with lawmakers on Tuesday to argue against stripping the NSA of what they called a crucial counter-terrorism tool. Siding with President Obama were not just House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), but also Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), who made an impassioned plea on the House floor for her colleagues to reject the amendment.

It's pretty easy to see why the amendment almost passed, though. Among the strongly held beliefs about personal privacy in the House, "polls showed the idea — depending on how you describe it — playing incredibly well," says David Weigel at Slate. "Members of Congress read polls."

In a new Washington Post/ABC News survey, 74 percent of respondents say the NSA's surveillance efforts infringe on some Americans' privacy rights, and 49 percent believe the data-snooping violates their own privacy. Only 42 percent of respondents say they believe the NSA's surveillance regime is making America safer from terrorists, while 47 percent say it's not making much of a difference.

Overall, by a 57-39 percent margin, the poll found that Americans think it is more important for the government to investigate terrorist threats than to protect privacy — the narrowest margin since 2002.

It's a good thing this motley coalition of "anti-antiterror liberals" and "Republicans for Snowden" didn't succeed in kneecapping the NSA, says The Wall Street Journal in an editorial siding with, yes, the Obama administration.

The Amash amendment may have failed this time, but the tide is turning against the NSA and its "egregious overreach," says the ACLU's Alexander Abdo in The Guardian, siding with a conservative Republican congressman. Congress needs to curb the NSA, or tacitly allow the spy agency's "radical view of the Constitution" to "fundamentally transform the relationship between citizen and government," Abdo says.