The fight over how to reform a key surveillance authority will continue for at least 43 days, after Congress opted Thursday for a short-term extension while it sorts out a host of concerns from lawmakers.
“If we’re going to get a chance to have a debate about reform, we can’t do that overnight,” Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told NOTUS of the short-term extension of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows the U.S. to spy on the communications of foreign threats abroad.
The House passed a longer-term FISA reauthorization bill with bipartisan support Wednesday. But lawmakers in all corners of the Capitol have issues with that bill, including whether it adequately protects U.S. citizens’ data from being swept up in federal agents’ searches for foreign threats.
Senators chafed at an added provision in the House’s bill to regulate cryptocurrency, and were largely on board with a shorter extension to buy more negotiating time. In exchange for his vote, Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden finagled a deal to send a bipartisan to the director of national intelligence urging declassification of a court opinion he says described “major compliance issues” with FISA, as he has been urging for weeks. He had signaled he would not support a short-term authorization without that assurance.
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The House, with some consternation, passed the short-term extension later Thursday afternoon, preventing a lapse in the authority on Friday.
“This is not the outcome that any of us would’ve wanted for the 702 program, but here we are,” Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, who backed the long-term agreement already passed by the House, said on the floor before the vote. “This temporary extension will ensure that there is no disruption to the program while we work out our differences on a longer reauthorization.”
Congress will now have another six weeks to work through a host of reform demands while the U.S. national security apparatus can keep monitoring foreign threats abroad.
House Democrats, 42 of whom voted for the long-term bill, are eager to go back to the drawing board in hopes of adding more privacy safeguards for U.S. citizens.
“In theory, it would be another bite at the apple,” said Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, of the Senate’s short-term patch before it passed. “I’d always hoped that we might get something that was more bipartisan. It was bipartisan in the end, but it would have been nice to have more votes.”
Himes said a new bipartisan deal could be finalized within a few weeks. But the urgency of the impending deadline and lawmakers’ rush to get out of town for a recess pushed the short-term extension over the finish line.
“I think I have some colleagues who are already calling their Ubers for the airport,” Himes said.
Senate Democrats also hope to wrangle more reforms into any long-term reauthorization. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Wyden and other senators will get their day on the floor.
“In the end, he and others will get, not a lot, but some of the stuff that they want, to get a longer-term deal,” Thune said. “But to get to a longer-term deal, we’ve got to keep the lights on, and so that’s the goal today.”
Some Republicans in the House and Senate are also clamoring for further safeguards, which they say would make it harder for Americans’ data to be swept up in FISA searches. Sen. Josh Hawley said he’s skeptical of FISA broadly and welcomed the chance to renegotiate it.
“I think we need to see more thorough reforms to protect Americans’ own information,” Hawley said. “So I don’t really like this kick the can down the road thing, which I think we’re going to do again. But, you know, we’ll see what we can get to in the next month or two.”
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