[Osiris]

> “What’s noteworthy is no one on the panel said: ‘Hey, wait a minute, we can’t do this,'” he says. “They had some specific concerns about the language of the bill, but there was no outright opposition.”

That's pretty surprising given how incredibly conservative/Republican the state of Utah is. I'd be surprised if the bill passed (and if it was it would surely be caught up in litigation), but kudos to someone in such a conservative area recognizing that personal liberty is more important than security.

[kcorbitt]

For what it's worth, I went to the July 4 Stop the NSA rally at the Utah data center two years ago when I was living there. It drew quite a large crowd and felt to me like a large cross-section of the population from a number of different political and social groups.

I don't think there's anything strange about a predominantly Republican state being worried about what "big brother" is up to in their own back yard. Especially Utah, which still has an unusually fresh memory of real repression at the hands of the federal government related to its history with Mormonism[1] and polygamy[2]. It probably also helps that the Democratic Obama administration has caused a lot of Republican voters in Utah to dislike the federal government even further.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_War [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latter_Day_Saint_polygamy_in_th...

[gliese1337]

Why should that be surprising? Republicans / conservatives are all about personal liberty. And reducing taxes, which seems relevant in this case. The justification given in the article for supporting the bill is that they don't want to support the NSA "on the back of our citizens", after all.

[GFK_of_xmaspast]

Generally only personal liberty for people like them, tho.

[toomuchtodo]

Not sure why you and /u/spacemanmatt were downvoted. Republicans are blocking a bill in the Senate currently to curtail the NSA's surveillance dragnet: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/19/us/nsa-phone-records.html?...

If they're for personal liberty, its not for Joe Public.

[spacemanmatt]

That's not quite accurate. Republicans are all about their personal liberty, at the cost of yours and mine. It's not that surprising that some Republicans favor cutting the NSA's water, it's just bitterly ironic.

[MrZongle2]

Don't confuse Republicans with conservatives: the latter, which generally are for personal liberty for all, are just a subset of the former.

Spend some time in conservative circles and you'll learn that there's not a lot of love for the GOP leadership. Conservatives (both fiscal and social flavors; they too are not just one and the same) vote Republican for the same reason many on the Left vote Democrat: not that they're thrilled with the candidates, but rather they consider them the lesser of two evils.

My point? That just as its unfair and ignorant to paint everyone on the Left as a socialist, you can't simply paint everyone on the right with the same broad brush.

[semanticist]

Outside of the US it's reasonable to 'paint' the political Left as socialists, mostly because they actually are. Other countries have actual functioning Leftist parties, America has far-Right and extraordinarily far-Right. (Although, I'll grant you that it might not seem that way from inside the US political 'bubble'.)

[ende]

This is common rhetoric from America's own left but it isn't entirely accurate, and is largely offset by the fact that American use of the term Liberalism differs vastly with the rest of the world and history. Actual socialist parties have waned to a barely marginal existence in most European countries, and often have at most a "tea party" like relationship to more center-left social-democratic parties. America's Democratic Party is closer to a European Social Democrat party than a centrist European Liberal Democrat party, as America's use of the word Liberal is far to the left of European use of the term. Many European countries have sizable centrist 'classical liberal' parties that would actually be considered 'to the right' of American liberals, oddly enough.

So no, America is not really a right and far right country, it's more a polity of extreme Conservative and progressive ideologies lorded over by two centrist parties with a heavily authoritarian commonality between them. What the U.S. entirely lacks is an anti-authoritarian centrist Liberalism akin to that in Europe.

To illustrate, if we were to align US parties to those parties in the UK, you'd likely get the following: the conservative Republicans (US) align to the conservative Tories (US), the far right Tea Party aligns to the far right UKIP (UK), the progressive Democrats (US) align to the social democratic Labor party (UK), and then the UK's centrist Liberal Democrats do not align to any recognizable political organization in the US. The UK Lib Dems at best might loosely align to a combination of US civil libertarians and classical liberals, both of which belong more or less to the politically homeless. Some might say those fall under the Democrat tent, and yet the most vocal proponent of civil liberties in the US government right now is conservative Rand Paul, so go figure.

To come full circle, a US equivalent of the UK LibDems, were it to exist, would likely be the most vocal opposition to the NSA.

Appropriate username btw :)

[semanticist]

Labour aren't really social democratic any more - they've basically isolated themselves from the Labour Movement and are fully committed to US-style Corporatist capitalism. In that regard, I agree, they're roughly equivalent to the US Democratic party and doesn't really represent a leftist movement.

The Lib Dems are ineffective, where's the US comparison to the SNP, the Greens, the SSP, actual parties of the left?

[GFK_of_xmaspast]

To be a social conservative is to necessarily want a return to the world in which women and minorities knew their place.

[MrZongle2]

[Citation Needed]

To be sure, a thorough examination of social conservative thought will be fascinating reading.

[hga]

In the first serious vote on this issue, in the House, it didn't break down along any typical metric, e.g. not by party or region.

Your surprise that "incredibly conservative/Republican" types are for this reveals that you don't know very much about us.

[wdr1]

> That's pretty surprising given how incredibly conservative/Republican the state of Utah is

Isn't Ted Cruz held out as incredibly conservative/Republican? He voted "Yes" on the recent NSA reform:

http://politics.nytimes.com/congress/votes/113/senate/2/282

There are many other conservatives who have major issues with the NSA. Don't believe the hype that their principles are simply anti-left.

[snowwrestler]

"Conservative" and "Republican" are both very broad terms. A conservative Republican could be an evangelical Christian who wishes to use the power of the state of enforce their rules of morality. Or it could be a hawkish statist who does not believe that the national defense apparatus could ever overreach. Or it could be a near-libertarian originalist who believes the government should be shrunk back to the size it was in 1800.

[ende]

Your comment implies that the national security state is a partisan issue, which does not seem to be the case at all. Democrats are often some of the worst offenders on this issue (see the current administration), while the Republican side contains both your John McCains and Rand Pauls. The line that divides advocates of security vs freedom cuts across America in a way that cannot be described by outdated left-right ideological nomenclature.

[pXMzR2A]

> That's pretty surprising given how incredibly conservative/Republican the state of Utah is.

Isn't it conservatives that are for guns and their reason is the anti-government militia amendment in the constitution? I'd expect them not to like NSA either.

[pavel_lishin]

I'd wager it comes more from a "small government" view, rather than the "gov't taking away my guns".