Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. —Robert F. Kennedy, address at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, June 6, 1966 Is Congress Getting a Backbone? In certain quarters there have been a few green shoots of pushback to the Deep State and its demands. When Edward Snowden revealed the NSA’s collection of sensitive data on U.S. citizens, I suspected that it would be at most a two-week story, like the disclosure of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, or James Risen’s exposé in the New York Times of the complicity of the telecoms in NSA spying. Yet Snowden’s disclosure continued to build, gain resonance with the public, and even stir a somnolent Congress. Barely a month afterward, the House of Representatives narrowly failed to agree to an amendment that would have defunded the NSA’s warrantless collection of data.
