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Before May, Congress has no alternative but to endorse or end NSA spying on the phone calls of virtually every American. What is the will of the new party in charge?

Toby Melville/Reuters

The Patriot Act substantially expires in May 2015.

When the new Congress takes up its reauthorization, mere months after convening, they'll be forced to decide what to do about Section 215 of the law, the provision cited by the NSA to justify logging most every telephone call made by Americans.

With Republicans controlling both the Senate and the House, the GOP faces a stark choice. Is a party that purports to favor constitutional conservatism and limited government going to ratify mass surveillance that makes a mockery of the Fourth Amendment? Will Mitch McConnell endorse a policy wherein the Obama administration logs and stores every telephone number dialed or received by Roger Ailes of Fox News, Wayne LaPierre of the NRA, the Koch brothers, the head of every pro-life organization in America, and every member of the Tea Party? Is the GOP House going to sacrifice the privacy of all its constituents to NSA spying that embodies the generalized warrants so abhorrent to the founders?

The issue divides elected Republicans. Senator Rand Paul and Rep. Justin Amash are among those wary of tracking the phone calls of millions of innocent people. Senator Richard Burr favors doing it. Republicans pondering a run for president in 2016 will be trying to figure out how mass surveillance will play in that campaign.

Many would rather not take any stand before May, as if governingthe very job citizens are paying them to dois some sort of trap. But their preferences don't matter.

This fight cannot be avoided.

Nor is it the only one that touches on surveillance. The dubiously named USA Freedom Act began as an effort to reform the NSA and has since been weakened. The NSA and FBI engages in lots of questionable surveillance besides the phone dragnet. Republicans will now run the Senate and House intelligence committees.

Rather than urging the GOP to avoid "the governing trap," National Review and other outlets purportedly dedicated to constitutional conservatism ought to be demanding that Republicans use their newfound power to rein in our surveillance bureaucracy, for anyone with a healthy mistrust of government should see how easily its staggering power, exercised in secret, could be ruinous to liberty. A limited government movement that does not demand oversight and reform, now that its party has regained power, is a farce. To endorse the national surveillance bureaucracy as it now stands is tantamount to declaring oneself a trusting statist.

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Now the GOP Must Choose: Mass Surveillance or Privacy?

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NSA reform may be the last true bipartisan issue.

Republicans won victories nationwide in Tuesdays midterm election, handily taking control of Congress and ousting two key criticsSenator Mark Udall (D. Colorado) and Senator Mark Begich (D. Alaska)of the NSA. The GOP takeover of the legislative branch means Republicans will chair all senate committees, including the powerful Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Privacy advocates like the ACLU are often aligned with the Democratic and liberal sides of politics, so it stands to reason that some might worry this would be a crushing blow to privacy. The biggest NSA defenders are Republicans; the Patriot Act that justifies much of the spying behavior disclosed by Edward Snowden was created and passed under a Republican administration and Congress; and a majority of Republican lawmakers have voted to enhance those spying powers over the years, even after the Snowden information was revealed.

Further, 2015 is shaping up to be a key year in the fight for privacy in the post-Snowden era. A number of provisions of the Patriot Act will be up for reauthorization next June. The USA Freedom Act, which aims to curtail NSA powers, will also finally be up for consideration in the Senate. With more than half of the American people disapproving of the NSAs activities, reform is a clearly pressing issue.

Yet, a Republican majority in the House and Senate is not the devastating blow to privacy you might have expected it to be. Here are four reasons why.

Though NSA reform once was a partisan issue, Edward Snowdens revelations of the depth of government surveillance united Democrats and Republicans in calling for an overhaul. Neema Singh Guliani, legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union, says its too early to tell what direction the new leadership will go, but she says the issue of NSA reform is not a one-senator or a one-party issue.

Take Colorado, for instance. Outgoing Democratic Senator Mark Udall was one of the Senate intelligence committees few members who persistently criticized the agencies it oversaw. He fought all expansions of NSA reach and opposed using drones to spy on US citizens, introduing a bill in 2013 to ensure private drone operators could not spy on people in this country.

If he were to be replaced by a pro-NSA senator, the weight of the reform movement would have become severely unbalanced.

In fact, Republican Cory Gardner, who beat Udall handily by 4 percentage points, has such a good record on privacy that Udall was essentially unable to run on his own sterling record. Gardner recently reversed his position on matters of privacy. Though he initially voted for the updated and expanded Patriot Act in 2011 (which Udall was staunchly against), Gardners record changed dramatically after Snowdens NSA revelations, consistently voting against expanding NSA reach. As a congressman, he co-sponsored the EFF-backed version of the new USA Freedom Act.

This kind of bipartisan support for privacy issues is not unique to Colorado, as one look at the congressional scorecard compiled by the coalition for StandAgainstSpying reveals.

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Republicans Taking Over Congress Isnt the Privacy Nightmare Youd Think