(Headline USA) A bill that would reauthorize a controversial domestic surveillance program was blocked Wednesday by a revolt of principled lawmakers. The legislative impasse follows calls earlier in the day from former President Donald Trump to “kill” the measure.
The breakdown comes months after a similar process to reform and reauthorize the surveillance program fell apart before it even reached the House floor. The procedural vote to bring up the bill Wednesday failed 193-228, with nearly 20 Republicans voting no.
The bill in question would renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which permits the U.S. government to collect without a warrant the communications of non-Americans located outside the country to gather foreign intelligence. The reauthorization is currently tied to a series of reforms aimed at satisfying critics who complained of civil liberties violations against Americans.
I just spoke on the House floor to urge my colleagues to move forward with a vote on an amendment requiring warrants for FISA surveillance of Americans.
If the warrant amendment doesn't pass, we must vote no on FISA reauthorization. pic.twitter.com/xX4S3v2wZ5
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) April 10, 2024
But Republican opponents have complained that those changes did not go far enough. Among the detractors are some of House Speaker Mike Johnson’s harshest critics, members of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus, who have railed the speaker for flip-flopping on FISA after previously supporting warrant requirements.
It remains unclear now if the proposal, backed by the Biden administration and Johnson, would eventually have enough votes to advance.
Though the program would technically expire on April 19, the Biden administration said it expects its authority to collect intelligence to remain operational for at least another year, thanks to an earlier opinion from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees surveillance applications.
U.S. officials have said the tool, first authorized in 2008 and renewed several times since then, is crucial in disrupting terror attacks, cyber intrusions and foreign espionage and has also produced intelligence that the U.S. has relied on for specific operations.
But the administration’s efforts to secure reauthorization of the program have encountered fierce, and bipartisan, pushback, with Democrats like Sen. Ron Wyden who have long championed civil liberties aligning with Republican supporters of Trump, who in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday stated incorrectly that Section 702 had been used to spy on his presidential campaign.
“Kill FISA,” Trump wrote in all capital letters. “It was illegally used against me, and many others. They spied on my campaign.” A former adviser to his 2016 presidential campaign was targeted over potential ties to Russia under a different section of the surveillance law.
A specific area of concern for lawmakers has centered on the FBI’s use of the vast intelligence repository to look up information about Americans and others in the U.S. Though the surveillance program only targets non-Americans in other countries, it also collects communications of Americans when they are in contact with those targeted foreigners.
In the past year, U.S. officials have revealed a series of abuses and mistakes by FBI analysts in improperly querying the intelligence repository for information about Americans or others in the U.S, including about a member of Congress and participants in the racial justice protests of 2020 and the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Those violations have led to demands for the FBI to have a warrant before conducting database queries on Americans, which FBI director Chris Wray has warned would effectively gut the effectiveness of the program and was also legally unnecessary since the database contained already lawfully collected information.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
