Speaker Mike Johnson is making a last-ditch effort to reauthorize a key surveillance law before it expires at the end of the month, as the Senate threatens to take over after weeks of unsuccessful negotiations in the House.
Johnson released the text of a new extension bill on Thursday aimed at appeasing ultraconservative privacy hawks. It would extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a law that allows the U.S. to surveil the communications of foreign threats abroad, for three years. The version proposed by Johnson also contains changes which would require audits of the procedures used to target data under the spy law, additional criminal penalties for misuse of the law and more internal oversight.
But it doesn’t add a warrant requirement before accessing Americans’ communications, which many lawmakers from both parties have clamored for. It also leaves out a new prohibition of central bank digital currency that conservatives have wanted included.
“Look, if you’re not gonna have warrants, I’m not gonna play ball,” Rep. Tim Burchett, one of the conservative holdouts opposing the bill, told reporters Thursday before the text came out. “That better be part of it.”
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Johnson’s office did not comment beyond the language it released.
With many lawmakers already headed home for the weekend, time is running out to reauthorize the program. It expires on April 30, a new deadline Congress set after negotiations melted down last week. Without the law, intelligence agencies say, they’ll have less information to conduct counterterrorism and other operations.
Conservatives concerned about privacy and some Democrats, who distrust the Trump administration, are insisting on adding privacy safeguards to prevent Americans’ communications being swept up in searches under the law.
The White House, which has supported a clean extension, did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
The Republican holdouts are also pushing for a prohibition on central bank digital currency, which they also say is a privacy issue.
“Add CBDC, and I think you can get it and you can send it to the Senate,” Rep. Chip Roy told reporters Wednesday.
The Senate has watched the House’s inability to get a deal and its members are eager to jump in. Senate Majority Leader John Thune teed up a clean three-year extension of FISA Wednesday, meaning it can come up for consideration next week. With enough senators having an appetite for reforms, that bill could be amended before coming to the House.
Sen. Dick Durbin, a Senate Democrat leading the push for additional privacy guardrails, told NOTUS on Thursday that there are “preliminary talks” about amendments to the Senate version, but nothing will be decided until next week. He has proposed a bipartisan bill to add a warrant requirement as well as other reforms to add more internal oversight of FISA searches.
“It would be helpful if they could come up with an approach that addresses some of the concerns about privacy,” Durbin said of the House’s attempts to extend FISA.
Some Republican lawmakers chafed at the idea of rubber-stamping a Senate-led extension.
“That’d be very concerning to me,” Burchett said Thursday, when asked about the Senate potentially taking a bigger role. “I think we need to do our duty and just handle it.”
Rep. Ralph Norman, another holdout, told reporters Thursday that while the Senate “probably will” move its own vehicle for extending FISA, the clean three-year extension is not enough for him.
“Not to me,” Norman said when asked if the Senate’s push would be satisfactory. “We’ll let ’em try.”
With Democratic help, Republican leaders could still pass an extension without support from the ultraconservatives. Four House Democrats voted with Republican leadership on a procedural step for a clean extension last week.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, is leading Democratic negotiations, and he also insists on adding reforms that protect Americans’ data from being searched without a warrant under FISA.
“We got to get back to some constitutional basics here,” Raskin said when asked if he’d support the clean Senate extension. “The Fourth Amendment requires search warrants based upon probable cause, and that’s got to be the starting point of any meaningful conversation going forward.”
Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters at a Wednesday press conference that he’d spoken with Johnson about FISA earlier in the week and voiced concern about reauthorizing FISA with FBI Director Kash Patel in charge, although he said Raskin and Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, are the “point people” for bipartisan negotiations.
“I made clear to [Johnson]... if there was a chance for him to achieve somewhat modest Democratic support on a FISA 702 extension, that we needed to make sure we protect the privacy and civil liberties of the American people,” Jeffries said.
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