The House unanimously passed a short-term extension of the nation’s spy powers early Friday morning after GOP rebels dramatically rejected a late-night, last-minute deal to extend the measure for five years.
Instead, the bill pushes the expiration of the powers to April 30 from April 20, while adding some additional reforms and language intended to woo the holdouts.
The move buys time for leaders to figure out how to address Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act after the deal crumbled, while avoiding a lapse in the authorization that expires on April 20. The Senate, which gavels back in at 10 a.m. EDT Friday morning, must still pass the stopgap and get it to President Trump’s desk by the Monday deadline.
In a 200-220 vote at about 1:15 a.m. Friday morning, 12 Republicans voted with almost all Democrats against accepting the deal, text of which was revealed just hours before the vote, after two days of meetings and delays.
Republican opposition to the amendment came not only from right-wing members who pushed for more substantial reforms and who had spent hours negotiating the package with leadership, but also from some House Intelligence Committee members who had pushed for a straight reauthorization of the program.
Soon after, a procedural vote to advance a clean, 18-month reauthorization of program racked up enough votes to fail moments later, but GOP leaders held the vote open as they hashed out a fallback option.
That procedural vote, which members of the House Freedom Caucus had long objected to, officially failed in a 197-228 vote, with 20 Republicans voting against it and four Democrats — Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Wash.), Jared Golden (Maine), Josh Gottheimer (N.J.), and Tom Suozzi (N.Y.) — casting highly unusual votes to vote in favor of the rule, which is normally a test of party strength.
The House then brought up new legislation to extend the FISA authorization from April 20 to April 30, passing it by unanimous consent just after 2 a.m. and adjourning the House until Monday — canceling a day of previously-scheduled votes on Friday.
“We were very close tonight,” Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said walking off the floor in the wee hours of Friday morning. “There’s some nuances with the language and some questions that need to be answered, and we’ll get it done. The extension allows us the time to do that.”
“FISA is a critical national security tool. It’s also a very complicated piece of legislation, and what we’re trying to do is thread the needle of ensuring that we have this essential tool to keep Americans safe but also safeguard our constitutional rights, and making sure that the abuses of FISA in the past are no longer possible,” Johnson said.
It was a remarkable sequence of events even by the standards of the super-slim House majority that has given Republican leaders consistent headaches in advancing must-pass legislation.
Hellbound and Down 