Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) introduced an amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill Thursday to prevent the NSA from engaging in warrantless bulk collection, to stop spying on U.S. citizens and to keep the government from working with hardware manufacturers and installing “back doors for federal snooping convenience.”
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The Massie-Lofgren amendment, which passed the House by a vote of 293-123, is the type of thing that many Democrats have endorsed in the past but not many Republicans.
Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) tried to put forth a similar NSA-restricting bill called the USA Freedom Act. After too many modifications, the legislation had been gutted so much by the time it hit the House floor a senior member of Amash’s staff told Rare the bill was a “sham.”
Justin Amash spokesman: The USA Freedom Act is a sham
Amash has been dogged relentlessly by establishment Republicans Reps. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) who’ve called Amash “al-Qaeda’s best friend” for not supporting the NSA’s controversial metadata collection program
Rogers and Nunes–who have also called Amash not a “serious member of Congress”–both voted nay on the Massie amendment.
Because of the prevalence in the past of constitutionally-challenged Republicans like Rogers and Nunes, Massie was surprised when so many Republicans supported his pro-civil liberties bill.
“I expected a majority of Democrats, but wasn’t sure a majority of Republicans would support it. The opposition came from the intelligence and judiciary committees, which have jurisdiction over this,” he said. “The leader and the whip were also against it. But the good news is that the whip-elect [Steve Scalise of Lousiana] and the conference chair [Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington] did vote for it. Nancy Pelosi voted for it as well.”
Some have speculated that Massie and Amash’s libertarian leadership could be having a substantively conservative effect on the GOP overall, in that it is guiding more Republicans than ever, even some who could be considered part of the establishment, to supporting legislation that restrains government growth and power.
For the first time in a long time, are Republicans legitimately becoming the party of limited government again?
National Review’s Kevin Williamson views Massie’s successful establishment tweaking as a sign that an ascendant libertarianism within the Republican Party is bringing it back to its limited government roots. Williamson wrote:
Representative Massie, like Senator Paul a transplant to Kentucky, represents an emerging strain within the Republican party, also typified by new leaders such as Representative Justin Amash of Michigan, broadly described as “libertarian” but not really quite so ideological as that label suggests. There is a proper scope, scale, and role for the federal government, and those who intuit that it has well outgrown those proportions are by no means limited to card-carrying members of the Circle Bastiat and the Mont Pelerin Society.
Libertarian Republicans are getting things done not from the “Circle Bastiat,” as Williamson quipped, but in the nitty-gritty of Washington, D.C. Possibly because their principled stands concerning the role of government are becoming more palatable a wider audience and their representatives, as the bipartisan support of the Massie-Lofgren amendment indicated.
“What this is is not doctrinaire libertarianism but a genuine conservatism that has made less of an accommodation with the entrenched assumptions of Washington. And it is far from fringe,” Williamson continued. “More than two-thirds of the House, including, as noted, a majority of both parties, voted for the Massie amendment.”
“Republicans looking for a way forward could do worse than to take note of that fact,” Williamson added. “It is not that al-Qaeda et al. are not dangerous, which they certainly are — it’s that an unchecked United States government is potentially many orders of magnitude more dangerous.”