Jacob Sullum on the Bipartisan Privacy Coalition Revealed by the Amash Amendment

"This is not a game," Mike Rogers angrily warned last week, urging his colleagues in the House to vote against an amendment that would have banned the mass collection of telephone records by the National Security Agency. "This is real. It will have real consequences." Maybe he's right, says Senior Editor Jacob Sullum. Despite the Michigan Republican's best efforts to portray the amendment as a terrifying threat to national security, Sullum writes, it failed by a surprisingly narrow margin that could signal the emergence of a bipartisan coalition willing to defend civil liberties against the compromises supported by leaders of both parties.