The Senate on Thursday failed to bring to a vote an amendment to the defense authorization bill that aimed at expanding the sharing of cyber threat indicators between the public and private sectors, leaving uncertain for now the future of cyber security information sharing legislation in the Senate this year.
The amendment included a previously-approved bill out of the House Intelligence Committee that has bipartisan support, but Democrats oppose channeling the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) of 2015 as part of the process of approving the FY ’16 National Defense Authorization Act because it would limit debate on the cyber bill and prevent it from going through its own amendment process.
The CISA legislation, which was inserted into a separate amendment dealing with criminal history checks for childcare workers, was approved 14-1 by the Intelligence Committee earlier this year. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the ranking member on the committee and co-author of the bill, said on Wednesday that she assured members of her party they would have a chance to propose amendments to the legislation when it came to the floor.
“And I expect I would support some of them and would oppose some of them,” Feinstein said in the Senate on Tuesday. Without full consideration of the bill and potential amendments, she said “we won’t have a bipartisan vote, I believe, because like it or not, no matter how simple—and I’ve been through two bills now—this is not an easy bill to draft because there are conflicts on both sides.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) declined a request by his counterpart with the Democrats, Minority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.), to withdraw the CISA amendment and take it up as a standalone bill to be debated and voted on once the NDAA was completed. Reid said it would take two days to complete Senate debate on CISA.
The vote on the amendment containing the CISA language was 56-40 in favor of invoking cloture, four shy of the 60 votes needed to proceed with debate and a vote on the measure to add it to the NDAA.
Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), chairman of the Intelligence Committee and also a co-author of the CISA bill, said in a statement after the vote that “In opposing cloture on this bill…the Senate allows foreign adversaries and international criminals to continue to steal Americans’ personal information and intrude on their privacy.”
McConnell said on Wednesday and again on Thursday that in the wake of the cyber breach at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which he blamed on President Barack Obama, that the cyber legislation is necessary. He also said that cyber amendments could still be offered as part of the NDAA bill.