by Steven Richards
Both the House and Senate voted on Friday to extend the government’s spy powers under FISA for 10-days after Republicans struggled to iron out a compromise on reforms.
The House had voted in the dead of night to extend the controversial Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which faced steep opposition from a faction of the Republican conference who wanted reforms to the law, including a warrant requirement.
Speaker Mike Johnson initially attempted to tee up a vote Thursday afternoon on a bill that would extend the federal government’s foreign surveillance power for 18 months, a plan supported by the White House. However, after multiple rounds of voting on different plans, a cohort of House Republicans joined Democrats to block that extension.
Shortly after 2 a.m. on Friday, Republicans agreed to an even shorter 10-day extension to Section 702. The Senate will consider the stopgap on Friday, racing to approve it before the power expires.
President Donald Trump has called for House Republicans to pass an extension, arguing the powers, which allow U.S. spies to monitor communications of non-citizens abroad, are more necessary than ever during the conflict with Iran.
House Republicans who oppose the clean extension want to impose new warrant requirements for Section 702 surveillance to curtail possible abuses against American citizens. Before being reelected president for a second term, Trump criticized FISA for facilitating the abuses of the baseless Russia collusion investigation into his 2016 campaign.
In addition, Johnson, before becoming Speaker, wanted to see FISA reforms, but changed his mind.
“When I was a member of Judiciary, I saw all of the abuses of the FBI — there were terrible abuses, over and over and over,” Johnson said in 2024, according to The Hill.
“And then when I became Speaker, I went to the SCIF and got the confidential briefing from sort of the other perspective on that, to understand the necessity of Section 702 of FISA and how important it is for national security. And it gave me a different perspective,” he continued, using an abbreviation for sensitive compartmented information facility.
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Steven Richards is a reporter for Just the News. Zachery Schmidt is the digital editor of The Star News Network and contributed to this story.
