The most remarkable aspect of the last three weeks of Patriot Act/USA Freedom Act wrangling in Congress is how phenomenally bad Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell played his hand. From the outset, he completely misread not just his own conference in the Senate, but the Republican House. He insisted on postponing work on the USA Freedom Act, with the expiration of supposedly critical programs imminent, even after the House passed the bill. He somehow believed that he could bulldoze over all opposition—and a federal court ruling—to keep bulk collection of data alive in the Patriot Act, even though the House had overwhelmingly rejected it and plenty of senators were insisting that they wouldn't let it happen. He ignored the threat of Sen. Rand Paul—who is willing to do anything for a buck in his presidential campaign—to filibuster. He ignored the fact that Paul wasn't alone, and that there was no way he could get the majority votes he needed to have his way. So he lost. Hugely.
Why this supposed politically savvy mastermind screwed this up so hugely is a mystery even to his own colleagues.
"I don't know. I just don't," said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine.
"You'll have to ask him," said Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss. […]
"I don't know why McConnell got in the way of this. It just doesn't make sense to me," said Rep. Bill Flores, a senior House Republican from Texas.
If you ask McConnell, it's all President Obama's fault. His
floor speech at the end of debate and before final passage of the bill was a vehement and unhinged attack on Obama and his foreign policy. "The president's efforts to dismantle our counterterrorism tools have not only been inflexible, they are especially ill-timed," he said.
"The president ran in 2008 as the candidate who would end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terror. […] The book ends to the president's policies were the executive orders signed his very first week in office which included the declaration that Guantanamo would be closed within a year, without any plan for what to do with its detainees, and the executive orders that ended the Central Intelligence Agency's detention and interrogation program. […]
The president has been a reluctant commander in chief. And between those two bookends, my colleagues, much has occurred that has undermined our national security. […] My view is that the determined effort to fulfill campaign promises by the president back in 2008 reflects an inability to adapt to the current threat, what we have right now. An inflexible view of past political grievances, a policy that will leave the next president in a weaker position to combat ISIL.
So you see, McConnell's massive failure was all Obama's fault because he stopped torture and didn't keep troops in Iraq.