Congressional Republicans delayed key procedural votes Tuesday to advance an extension of the foreign surveillance law that expires Thursday.
Republican leaders are entangled with intraparty and cross-party dissatisfaction over reauthorizing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
House GOP leaders do not have enough Democratic support for their plan, so Senate Republicans are trying to negotiate a plan that can get the bipartisan support needed to clear both chambers.
Both efforts are flailing as the House tries to cram the FISA reauthorization into a packed legislative schedule for the week that includes adopting a budget resolution to unlock a filibuster-proof process for funding immigration enforcement and reauthorizing the farm bill.
House GOP leaders worked late into the evening Monday to win support from conservative hard-liners, but couldn’t close the deal.
“After waiting around all night for Republicans to make a deal — with themselves — on a procedural rule for the week, Democrats showed up to the Rules Committee for an 8 a.m. meeting. Unsurprisingly, when we showed up, we were told there is still no deal,” said Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, the panel’s top Democrat.
The Rules Committee reconvene Tuesday afternoon to advance the procedural rule for the FISA reauthorization and other pieces of legislation awaiting floor action this week.
House Freedom Caucus members and several other Republicans have threatened to block the FISA reauthorization bill that Speaker Mike Johnson, Louisiana Republican, released last week.
The measure included modest changes to the surveillance law but lacked provisions that conservatives demanded, such as a judicial warrant requirement for accessing U.S. citizens’ data and a ban on using artificial intelligence as a means of snooping on Americans.
The Rules Committee was not expected to allow any amendments on the floor, as the panel rejected Democratic efforts to lock in votes on bipartisan proposals related to judicial warrants.
Republican leaders offered one solution to appease conservatives: adding language in the procedural rule that would automatically add previously House-passed legislation to ban the Federal Reserve from issuing a central digital bank currency, or CDBC, to the FISA bill after it passes and before it is sent to the Senate.
The CDBC ban is not directly related to FISA but part of conservatives’ broader push to protect Americans against government surveillance and overreach.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune said a FISA bill containing a CDBC ban would be “dead on arrival” in his chamber.
The Senate also postponed a planned procedural vote Tuesday on a starter FISA bill containing a clean three-year extension of existing law.
The South Dakota Republican said “there’s an opportunity to add reforms” and that Senate Republicans were negotiating with Democrats in both chambers on a potential compromise in case the House could not pass its latest reauthorization proposal.
“Hopefully, if we can land this, we could get a big vote here out of the Senate, which hopefully would provide some momentum in the House,” he said.
But because a firm Senate plan for adding guardrails to the law had not materialized, Democrats were not willing to vote to begin debate on the bill Tuesday.
“We would have had the vote today at 11 a.m., but they didn’t have the votes,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, Oregon Democrat. “And I’ve been doing this for a long time. This is the first time I’ve ever been part of a debate where they didn’t have the votes.”
Mr. Wyden, a longtime proponent for adding more privacy shields to FISA to protect against abuse of Americans’ data caught up in the foreign surveillance, said the ability to delay the vote suggests movement toward the changes he and others have sought for years.
“Things like AI and selling people’s location data and the like — we’re not going along with things that put people at risk,” he said. “We’re going to say you have security and liberty; they’re not mutually exclusive.”
Mr. Thune said a warrant requirement for querying Americans’ data is one of many issues involved in the bipartisan discussions.
“How that would get structured matters a lot,” he said. “You certainly don’t want to impede or impair the ability to gather information that’s vital to national security.”
Mr. Wyden said he’s open to hearing various ideas on how to structure a warrant requirement but is partial to his bipartisan proposal.
“If the government says that there’s a danger to America under my warrant system, the government can go get the warrant immediately so that Americans are protected and come back after the fact and settle up so there’s some accountability,” he said. “I think it’s consistent with protecting the country and protecting liberty.”
Some lawmakers believe both chambers are far from a deal that can pass and another short-term extension of the surveillance authority will be needed.
“The House clearly doesn’t have the votes, and I don’t think we have the votes in the Senate,” said Sen. John Kennedy, Louisiana Republican. “There’s still a pretty robust debate about warrants, and there’s some heartburn — I’ve got some — about a three-year extension. And we’re nowhere near to working it out in my opinion.”
Mr. Thune said another short-term bill is “not ideal” but that “all options will be on the table to ensure that we don’t have a blackout.”
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