Congress voted in quick succession on Friday to give a controversial warrantless surveillance law a 10-day reprieve after Republican infighting blew up plans for a much longer renewal with no changes. The stopgap kept section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act alive past its planned April 20 expiration date, but only after lawmakers abandoned a clean extension that Donald Trump had repeatedly urged holdouts to back behind Speaker Mike Johnson.
The fight centered on section 702, first enacted in 2008, which lets national security agencies collect and review texts and emails sent to and from foreigners living outside the United States without a warrant. If Americans are talking to a non-US target abroad, those communications can get swept up too, and privacy advocates say the government also uses the law to spy on Americans without a warrant. Intelligence agencies say the program is necessary to prevent terror attacks and foreign espionage.
The scale of the rebellion inside the GOP exposed how fragile the deal was. A rare coalition of progressive Democrats and hardline Republicans joined forces against any unchanged extension, with one of their biggest demands being a warrant requirement for Americans’ communications incidentally collected under Fisa. An amendment with that requirement failed two years ago after a 212-212 tie, and this time 20 Republicans blocked their own leadership’s attempts for a procedural vote to push a clean 18-month extension through. Four Democrats crossed party lines to vote with the Republican majority before lawmakers finally agreed to the 10-day extension shortly after 2am ET. The Senate passed the measure later that morning.
Trump had been pressing the breakaway Republicans to unify, posting a blunt demand to “UNIFY” behind Johnson and support an extension of section 702 without changes. The collapse of the longer renewal turned what leadership hoped would be a quick victory into an overnight scramble, and even members of the House sounded stunned by the chaos. Jim McGovern asked, “Are you kidding me? Who the hell is running this place?”
Supporters of the stopgap treated the result as a tactical win, not a final settlement. Ro Khanna said, “We just defeated Johnson’s efforts to sneak through a five-year Fisa authorization tonight. Now, they will have to fight in daylight tomorrow!” Jake Laperruque called it “The shameful midnight smash-and-grab attempt to steal away Americans’ privacy rights failed,”
What comes next is simple and politically ugly: Congress has only 10 days to settle the dispute over a surveillance power that has been renewed in one form or another since 2008, and the unresolved fight over a warrant requirement is still what stands between lawmakers and a longer extension.
