This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, July 25th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Just two months after revelations about the National Security Agency's broad collection of your phone call data, the U.S. House has narrowly

turned back a bipartisan amendment to begin reining it in. As a baseline, the

vote signals broader support than previously thought for controlling this vast secret federal power.

Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, comments.

So the amendment sponsored by representatives Amash and Conyers to defund the NSA's bulk

phone record collection program failed by an incredibly slim margin it was a

217 to 205 so a 12 vote margin if 7 representatives had flipped,

this amendment would have passed. And that's I think actually incredibly

encouraging when you consider there are actually a lot of problems with

doing what they were trying to do in this way

even if you wanted to get rid of that program

so first of all this is an attempt to kill an intelligence program with a writer on an appropriations

bill.

And so I think there were people on the hill.

It sounds like who had quamas about that.

I thought this is something like this should really be done with a proper debate

about a standalone bill that could be discussed fully. You know there was some

separation of powers issues because of the limitations and what you can do in an appropriations bill.

There's sort of a requirement that only an order containing specific verbatim language can be

implemented by an agency.

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