The Senate has failed to approve either a bill to reform the controversial NSA bulk telephone collection program or a straight extension of provisions of the USA Patriot Act, Section 215, used to validate it before they are set to expire after May 31.

Working into the weekend, the Senate failed to pass the reform bill previously passed by the House, the USA Freedom Act (H.R. 2048) (Defense Daily, March 15). The vote was held early Saturday morning, when H.R. 2048 fell 3 votes short to reach cloture, 57-42.

“The Senate has demonstrated that the House-passed bill lacks the support of 60 Senators. I would urge a ‘‘yes’’ vote on the two-month extension,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said following the vote on the Senate floor.

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An opponent of the reform bill, McConnell introduced a clean extension of the expiring provisions with Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) on May 14, S. 1357.  

“Senator Burr, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, and Senator Feinstein, the ranking member, as we all know, have been working on a proposal that they think would improve the version that the Senate has not accepted that the House sent over. It would allow the committee to work on this bill, refine it, and bring it before us for consideration. So the two-month extension, it strikes me, would be in the best interest of getting an outcome that is acceptable to both the Senate and the House and hopefully the president,” McConnell said.

However, McConnell’s two-month extension, S. 1357, failed a cloture vote 45-52 and was followed by a flurry of failed attempts on any other short-term clean extensions.

The majority leader failed to reach votes on extensions through June 8, June 5, June 3, and June 2. Civil libertarian minded Senators Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M) thwarted the efforts by blocking unanimous consent requests.

“This is a debate about whether or not a warrant with a single name of a single company can be used to collect all the records, all of the phone records of all of the people in our country with a single warrant. Our forefathers would be aghast,” Paul said on the Senate floor.

“The Senate has refused to reauthorize bulk data collection. I am proud to have stood up for the Bill of Rights. But our fight is not over,” he later said from his Twitter account.

“Supporters of mass surveillance can no longer bully the U.S. Senate into extending an illegal and unconstitutional law by running out the clock. When Sen. McConnell tried to extend Patriot Act for five more days, I said no more,” Wyden said in a statement after the vote.

Heinrich piled on his opposition in a statement after the votes.

“It’s irresponsible that the Senate failed to pass the bipartisan USA Freedom Act, the one bill that enjoys majority support in both chambers of Congress. We had an opportunity to end an era of the government’s bulk collection of billions of private phone records of law-abiding Americans. In my view, this program clearly violates the spirit–if not the letter–of the Fourth Amendment, and ignores the will of the American people,” Heinrich said.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who introduced a Senate version of the USA Freedom Act (S. 1123), was disappointed with the Senate’s failure to pass H.R. 2048.

“It is unfortunate that some of my colleagues chose to continue to put our nation’s national security at risk by failing to choose the only option available to keep our nation’s most essential domestic counterterrorism programs up and running.”

The Senate is set to enter back into session and resume consideration of the issue on May 31 at 4 p.m., following the Memorial Day week-long recess. This gives the Senate only eight hours before the bulk data collection program and several other Patriot Act provisions related to wiretaps and surveillance expire.

Earlier this month the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled the existing provisions do not allow the NSA to collect bulk telephone metadata. However, it did not immediately order the end of the program because Section 215 is set to expire at the end of May if not reauthorized.