If the U.S. President Barack Obama thought that his party’s loss of control over the Senate after the November 4 midterm elections would not have immediate results on his cherished policy goals, he was in for a surprise.
Despite this being a “lame duck” session — the Senate’s new members are to assume official roles in January — this week the upper house of Congress nixed two major policy thrusts of the White House, the Keystone XL pipeline and proposals for a more transparent approach towards mass surveillance of telephone communications by the National Security Agency (NSA).
The Senate vote on the Keystone XL project, which connects Canada’s tar sands oil resources to a Texas refinery, narrowly failed to reach the 60-vote tally needed for passage.
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With 59 votes in support of and 41 against, even the backing of 45 Republicans was insufficient to get the bill passed on the floor of the Senate.
Meanwhile, Senators also brought the White House more pain through their rejection of the USA Freedom Act, a bill introduced in 2013 to end the NSA’s ongoing dragnet surveillance of U.S. phone data, which failed to reach 60-vote mark to avoid filibuster and get passed.
The bill emerged after the Obama administration faced a wave of criticism over the NSA’s mass surveillance as revealed by former NSA contractor-turned whistleblower Edward Snowden, and was passed by even the House of Representatives in May 2014 with bipartisan support.
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However this week despite pressure from the White House, technology giants and a wide range of civil liberties advocates, the bill was stymied by the ‘No’ votes — most of them being Republican Senators who feared that curbs on the NSA’s surveillance could leave the country exposed to another terrorist attack.