Congress could amend or repeal the PATRIOT Act any time it wants (even overriding a veto if it had the will), thus curtailing the NSA’s domestic spying abilities. They just won’t do it.
The Republicans in Congress won’t do it because (a) the program gives them too many talking points to use against the White House right now, and opposing Obama is more important to them than governing; (b) they figure they’ll get the White House back eventually, so they want to keep those powers in place; and (c) so far, no one seems to have seriously asked them why it was okay for Bush to have these powers but not Obama (remember, we’ve known about the NSA’s spying, in one form or another, since at least 2006), and taking actual action might prompt those questions.
Congressional Democrats won’t do it because if the White House stops spying on us, and then there’s another terrorist attack, the entire country will eat them alive for not doing enough to protect us.
We want the government to protect us from “terrorism” at all costs, unless we are the ones actually paying those costs. We are trapped in a catch-22 of our own making.
![GrahamColm at en.wikipedia [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], from Wikimedia Commons](http://crypticphilosopher.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/800px-Phage_injecting_its_genome_into_bacterial_cell-300x225.png "GrahamColm at en.wikipedia [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], from Wikimedia Commons")
