The debate in the Senate about extending the Patriot Act has gotten so bizarre that I suspect it is all kabuki.
Mitch McConnell's inability to muster a fillibuster-proof 60 votes for a straight extension of the controversial act has gotten most of the headlines, but there is a lot more happening underneath that we need to be aware of.

By the time senators broke for the holiday, they had blocked a House-passed bill and several short-term extensions of the key provisions in the Patriot Act.
The main stumbling block was a House-passed provision to end the NSA’s bulk collection of domestic phone records. Instead, the records would remain with telephone companies subject to a case-by-case review.

Even the White House backs these extremely modest reforms, yet McConnell, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and a majority of Senators want no reforms at all despite a federal appeals court ruling the domestic spying illegal earlier this month.
While you were all distracted by the political kabuki, an interesting report came out this week that normally would have gotten more attention.
The Justice Department’s inspector general released a damning report on the federal domestic spying under the Patriot Act.

As a condition for reauthorization back in 2005, the Justice Department was required to minimize the amount of nonpublic information that the program gathered on U.S. persons. According to the inspector general, the department did not adopt sufficient guidelines until 2013. It was not until August of that year -- two months after the bombshell National Security Agency disclosures by Edward Snowden -- that Justice began applying those guidelines in applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, the secretive body that approves government surveillance requests.

So only once Snowden made the public aware of the degree of domestic spying that the government was engaged in did they actually implement their own rules.
The next damning revelation from this report involves all that information the government collected while violating its own rules.

FBI agents can’t point to any major terrorism cases they’ve cracked thanks to the key snooping powers in the Patriot Act, the Justice Department’s inspector general said in a report Thursday that could complicate efforts to keep key parts of the law operating.
Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz said that between 2004 and 2009, the FBI tripled its use of bulk collection under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which allows government agents to compel businesses to turn over records and documents, and increasingly scooped up records of Americans who had no ties to official terrorism investigations.

Which means the Justice Department just confirmed what we already knew, all that domestic spying doesn't make us safer.
According to polls, a majority of Americans want the Patriot Act reformed, but much like trade bills, Congress doesn't represent the people anymore.

So what does this mean?
Unless something dramatic happens, the Patriot Act and the NSA spying is likely to lapse for at least a short period of time as of March 31.

The NSA has announced that it will begin shutting down its domestic spying programs this week.

Supposedly the Senate will return to session on the 31st. At which point they could just pass the bill that the House has already passed and the Senate rejected, which would make only superficial reforms.

Defense contractors, including companies like Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen Hamilton, and Northrop Grumman, account for 70 percent of the N.S.A.’s budget. These companies have a financial interest in making sure Congress does not limit the government’s ability to collect and analyze massive amounts of communications data. Perhaps that’s why the Intelligence Community supports the USA Freedom Act.

Now for fun, try this online quiz to see if you can tell the difference between the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the The Court that Josef K. of Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial stood before.
Please remember that the FISA court is real and will not be reformed.