Earlier tonight, the House voted on HR 4889, the Kelsey Smith Act
Earlier tonight, the House voted on HR 4889, the Kelsey Smith Act. The bill would have allowed the government to access cell phone location data, and more precisely, it would give the government the ability to redefine the occasions in which it could access records without the clearance of a judge. The bill tonight was a suspension, which are bills viewed for the most part as non-controversial and are accordingly considered under special procedure. Instead of a majority vote in the House, a suspension bill has to pass by a two-thirds super-majority. The bill got a majority of the vote - 229 to 158 - but did not pass because it did not meet the two-thirds requirement. I voted no and wanted to explain why.
One of the interesting aspects of this vote is the fact that the bill actually failed on the floor, something that’s not seen too often in the modern House of Representatives. Most of the horse trading on bills gets done behind closed doors, and as a result, before the bill even gets to the floor, most of the kinks have been ironed out. Indeed, the last time a bill failed on the floor was about six months ago. What is also interesting about this particular measure was the bipartisan opposition, with 50 Republicans and 108 Democrats voting against it.
I suspect what many of those members were concerned with were the significant privacy implications of the bill, chief among them was that it granted the government the power to define “emergency.” In that regard, the Founding Fathers included Fourth Amendment in the Constitution because they believed passionately in the fallibility of man. By extension, that would mean a government of men would be fallible as well. So on this issue, it would leave decision-making to people who simply worked for government rather than to those held to the standard of law, such as a judge. Do we really want someone in a back room to now have the sole and arbitrary ability to determine when to access another’s cell phone information?
I believe many people in government are well-meaning, but the Fourth Amendment was intended to protect citizens from both the good and bad intent of someone who harnesses the power of government.