House GOP passes short-term FISA deal amid Republican infighting
The House unanimously passed a short-term extension of the nation’s spy powers in the wee hours of Friday morning — pushing the deadline from April 20 to April 30 — after GOP rebels dramatically rejected a late-night, last-minute deal intended to woo holdouts.
The move buys time for leaders to figure out how to address Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act after the deal crumbled, while avoiding a lapse in the authorization that expires on April 20. The Senate, which gavels back in at 10 a.m. Friday morning, must still pass the stopgap and get it to President Trump’s desk by the Monday deadline.
In a 200-220 vote at about 1:15 a.m. Friday morning, 12 Republicans voted with almost all Democrats against accepting the deal, text of which was revealed just hours before the vote , after two days of meetings and delays.
Republican opposition to the amendment came not only from right-wing members who pushed for more substantial reforms and who had spent hours negotiating the package with leadership, but also from some House Intelligence Committee members who had pushed for a straight reauthorization of the program.
Soon after, a procedural vote to advance a clean, 18-month reauthorization of program racked up enough votes to fail moments later, but GOP leaders held the vote open as they hashed out a fallback option.
That procedural vote, which members of the House Freedom Caucus had long objected to, officially failed in a 197-228 vote, with 20 Republicans voting against it and four Democrats — Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Wash.), Jared Golden (Maine), Josh Gottheimer (N.J.), and Tom Suozzi (N.Y.) — casting highly unusual votes to vote in favor of the rule, which is normally a test of party strength.
The House then brought up new legislation to extend the FISA authorization from April 20 to April 30, passing it by unanimous consent just after 2 a.m. and adjourning the House until Monday — canceling a day of previously-scheduled votes on Friday.
“We were very close tonight,” Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said walking off the floor in the wee hours of Friday morning. “There’s some nuances with the language and some questions that need to be answered, and we’ll get it done. The extension allows us the time to do that.”
“FISA is a critical national security tool. It’s also a very complicated piece of legislation, and what we’re trying to do is thread the needle of ensuring that we have this essential tool to keep Americans safe but also safeguard our constitutional rights, and making sure that the abuses of FISA in the past are no longer possible,” Johnson said.
It was a remarkable sequence of events even by the standards of the super-slim House majority that has given Republican leaders consistent headaches in advancing must-pass legislation.
And it marked one of the most notable instances of the GOP’s right flank outright defying Trump’s wishes on a major vote. Trump had called for Republicans to “ unify ” and pass a “clean” 18-month reauthorization of the program without reforms, but Republicans in the Freedom Caucus and beyond rebelled and refused to support that.
The pathway forward to resolving myriad issues before the April 30 deadline is murky.
Privacy-minded lawmakers on both the right and left have pushed for a warrant requirement before accessing any information collected on Americans communicating with foreign targets.
But the failure of the amendment package negotiated over hours within the GOP showed that even with reforms, the party might be unable to secure the backing of its own members even with changes.
Democrats also grew increasingly alarmed about the amendment package proposed by Republicans, at first glance believing language referencing a warrant did little more than restate current law. But upon closer look, many feared that by failing to dictate where intelligence officers must secure a warrant, the GOP plan was actually opening the door to Justice Department-approved searches of Americans with little oversight.
Some features of that package, such as increasing penalties for FISA abuses and allowing a greater number of lawmakers to review action before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), might easily win the backing of both parties.
But any potential warrant discussion is sure to remain a sticking point.
Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, has drafted a proposal that would require a FISC judge before looking at any information collected on Americans, needing to convince the court that the information was “reasonably likely to return foreign intelligence information.”
“The attempt by Republicans and the Trump Administration to ram through a five-year FISA extension in the middle of the night without any consultation with Democrats and with ambiguous text ended right where it should have, with another GOP failure on the floor,” he said in a statement after the vote series.
“In agreeing to a two-week extension of this authority, Democrats have made clear that this will need to be a true bipartisan process, and they must work with us in good faith to reach an agreement that puts in place significant reforms and safeguards.”
Updated at 10:56 a.m. EDT
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