White House: ‘We Are At Risk’ From Terrorism Because Of Republican ‘Political Ambition’

With the Patriot Act set to expire on June 1, and the bill that aims to replace and reform it facing razor-thin opposition in the Senate, the White House is ratcheting up the pressure on Republicans to pass the USA Freedom Act. On Thursday morning, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to explain the risks involved in failing to pass the legislation, and to place the blame squarely on Republicans.

Over the weekend, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) blocked several short-term extensions of the Patriot Act, while 41 Republicans (including Paul) and Sen. Angus King (I-ME) sustained a filibuster on the bill that reforms it. Until recently, the Obama administration has conspicuously threaded the needle between pressuring Congress to act, and managing the sense of peril that pressure entails. Josh Earnest has consistently punted on questions about the risk of allowing the Patriot Act to expire without passing the reform legislation, and on Tuesday, President Obama walked a thin line on this as well:

I strongly urge the Senate to work through this recess and make sure that they identify a way to get this done. Keep in mind that the most controversial provision in there, which had to do with the gathering of telephone exchanges in a single government database — that has been reformed in the USA Freedom Act. But you have a whole range of authorities that are also embodied in the Patriot Act that are non-controversial, that everybody agrees are necessary to keep us safe and secure. Those also are at risk of lapsing.

So this needs to get done. And I would urge folks to just work through whatever issues can still exist, make sure we don’t have, on midnight Sunday night, this task still undone, because it’s necessary to keep the American people safe and secure.

On Thursday morning, however, “necessary to keep us safe and secure” turned into “we are at risk,” a subtle but significant rhetorical shift. In that interview with Morning Joe, Josh Earnest also explained the reforms that the USA Freedom Act makes to bulk data collection, while also resisting Scarborough’s attempts to conflate the Patriot Act with the reform bill…READ MORE

By: Tommy Christopher

Tommy Christopher is The Daily Banter's White House Correspondent and Political Analyst. He's been a political reporter and liberal commentator since 2007, and has covered the White House since the beginning of the Obama administration, first for PoliticsDaily, and then for Mediaite. Christopher is a frequent guest on a variety of television, radio, and online programs, and was the villain in the documentaries The Audacity of Democracy and Hating Breitbart. He's also That Guy Who Live-Tweeted His Own Heart Attack, and the only person to have ever received public apologies from both Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.