Senate GOP Targets House-Passed Warrantless Surveillance Bill

Senators from both parties warn that expanded surveillance authority under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) could lapse after Friday due to a battle over the House bill amendment that has become a target of Republicans conservatives and some Democrats.

Opponents of the bill could drag the Senate debate past Friday’s 11:59 p.m. deadline, which threatens to cause a lapse in warrantless surveillance authority that some lawmakers warn could leave the country exposed to an attack. at a dangerous time.

“It would be a very big problem. FISA is extremely important for alerting us to terrorist plots, for example. And I believe the threat of a terrorist attack is much greater than is being discussed,” warned Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine), senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (DN.Y.) announced Monday that he would introduce the House-passed bill to reauthorize the controversial Section 702 of FISA, which authorizes the nation’s intelligence agencies to collect the phone numbers of Americans in contact with foreign intelligence targets, in the Senate calendar.

That means it would take more than a week to process the bill on the Senate floor, and opponents of the legislation are threatening to delay debate beyond the Friday deadline unless they have time to debate and vote on changes to the bill.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), an outspoken critic of the FISA program, said he is willing to let it expire over the weekend if he fails to get changes to the bill considered on the Senate floor.

“We need to debate – we have already had five years [to reauthorize the program] — I think we have time to debate whether or not it is appropriate for our government to spy on its own citizens without a warrant,” he said.

Paul said he would agree to speed up the process depending on “how much debate Democrats are willing to allow.”

But he said he would have no problem letting the program lapse, arguing that the country and its intelligence agencies were functioning well enough before Congress passed FISA in 1978.

He dismissed colleagues who warned that a lapse in authority would expose the nation to attacks as “alarming.”

Paul and his allies who criticized the surveillance program last week were energized when former President Trump urged Congress to “kill FISA.”

The Kentucky senator said he plans to offer a companion amendment to the proposal sponsored by Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), which failed in a tie vote in the House, to require a warrant to review data on Americans swept up in surveillance. foreigners.

He will also offer an amendment to prohibit law enforcement and intelligence agencies from acquiring data about people in the United States and Americans abroad and another to prevent these agencies from using FISA to search an American’s communications, even with a warrant. .

“I’m not worried about the date,” he said of the looming deadline. “If all else fails, I think we can live under the Constitution maybe for a day, maybe two days.”

The debate over FISA has sparked internal battles in the Senate Republican and Democratic conferences.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) rejected Paul’s threat to drag the FISA debate into the weekend, vowing on Monday not to let the surveillance authority “go dark.”

“At the end of the week, a critical authority that U.S. law enforcement and intelligence professionals rely on to monitor and mitigate serious threats will expire. A crucial window into the activities of those who wish to harm Americans is about to disappear,” McConnell said on the Senate floor.

He warned that letting the program lapse would be “forgetting the lessons of 9/11”, referring to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon more than two decades ago.

“We have until Friday to prevent a dangerous lapse in a critical tool for identifying and stopping espionage and terrorism against the United States. If any of our colleagues believe that now is the appropriate time to make this mission even more difficult, I would be very interested in hearing their logic,” he said.

Getting the expired FISA authority renewed by the end of the week will be a more difficult challenge than usual, because the Senate will also have to reconcile articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, which the House is expected to send to the Capitol at 2:15 pm on Tuesday. .

Senators expect to spend Wednesday afternoon and possibly Wednesday night debating impeachment and whether to hold a full trial on the Senate floor.

“I think there’s going to be a bit of a pileup,” Senate Republican leader John Thune (SD) said with a dose of understatement. “We are worried about FISA, yes.”

Senate Democrats, including Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a senior member of the Intelligence Committee, are also criticizing the House-passed bill, which they argue does not go far enough to reform Section 702. .

Wyden warned last week that “this bill represents one of the most dramatic and terrifying expansions of government surveillance authority in history.”

“I will do everything in my power to prevent it from being approved in the Senate,” he declared.

The House bill includes several reforms, such as implementing a more rigorous approval process for searching the 702 database for information belonging to Americans.

But some of the changes to the show angered critics like Paul and Wyden.

Paul said language was added to the program reauthorization to make it easier to prosecute drug crimes, and Wyden called some of the changes “striking” and “impressive.”

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner (D-Va.) said he would oppose amendments to the bill, which was carefully negotiated between Senate and House leaders. He warned that changes to this date would open “a can of worms”.

The measure passed the House on Friday after a bruising fight. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) agreed to reduce the program’s authorization from five years to two to placate conservative critics in his conference.

It passed the lower house 273-147 after House conservatives derailed a rule to govern its consideration on the floor.