What kicked off this whole thing was Clapper lying to the elected representative about what the NSA was doing. That was the trigger event that caused Snowden to finally leak his cache. So I don't think you can totally blame Congress or the Senate, even though they surely have deep problems.

The US was not built by this type of security. What the NSA is doing only became possible quite recently. It's just in a whole other world to what was previously imaginable.