Senate rejects House’s FISA bill, pitches 45-day extension ahead of looming deadline
The Senate scrapped the House’s reauthorization of the nation’s controversial spying powers and is instead moving on a temporary extension of the program.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told Fox News Digital that the upper chamber would extend the divisive Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for 45 days as lawmakers continue to work on reforms to the program.
“We’ll kick it over there and process it quickly, and we’ll kick the can down the road again,” Thune said.
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The maneuver comes after the House on Wednesday passed a three-year extension to the program with modest reforms that included a ban on central bank digital currencies — a priority of conservatives in the lower chamber.
But the inclusion of that provision was a nonstarter in the Senate, given that it was unrelated to the underlying bill and was already baked into a housing affordability package passed by the Senate in March that the House has yet to move on.
Now, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., will again have to bring House Republicans on board to back the legislation.
The process was nearly derailed when Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., announced that he planned to block the Senate’s alternative plan in favor of a shorter, three-week extension.
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It’s one of the few horseshoe issues in Congress that blends Democrats and conservatives in a push for stronger privacy protections. That’s because of the Section 702 spying powers, which allow the government to spy on foreign nationals abroad.
However, nothing in the law prevents it from collecting data on Americans if they happen to be involved in those communications. To stop that, Wyden and others are demanding warrant requirements to add a layer of protection for Americans’ whose conversations are ensnared under Section 702.
The House’s version lacked that reform, but Wyden agreed to an extension after working with Sens. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and Mark Warner, D-Va., the top lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence panel, to send a letter to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and the acting Attorney General to declassify a FISA court ruling to show how the program is being used against Americans.
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Meanwhile, conversations on reforms are still ongoing.
Thune said that there was “already a pretty substantial dialogue” between Cotton, Warner, their House counterparts and the White House to address reforms while ensuring that the “program works.”
“So we’re entertaining those ideas at the moment, and we’ll see where that conversation goes,” Thune said. “We got 45 days. I don’t like kicking the can down the road, not my jam.”
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