Johnson Faces Revolt Over Extension of FISA Warrantless Surveillance
We know it will eventually pass.
House Republican leaders pushed a vote on extending FISA warrantless surveillance to April after many Republicans spoke up against it.
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) expires on April 20. It allows the government to spy on a foreign national suspected of having ties to terrorism.
The government can spy on a foreign national even if an American citizen is on the other end of the communications without a warrant (emphasis mine):
Although the law requires the government to direct this surveillance at people outside the United States, in practice, it routinely ensnares Americans. Section 702 allows the government to target any foreigner abroad for warrantless surveillance to obtain “foreign intelligence information.” The government’s targets need not have any connection to criminal activity or terrorism; they can be journalists, human rights workers, or businesspeople communicating about the “foreign affairs” of the United States. In the course of this surveillance, the government vacuums up—without a warrant—the communications of countless Americans who have texted, called, messaged, or emailed any one of hundreds of thousands of foreign targets.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has a thin majority.
More than likely, the measure will pass because we all know members of Congress can be bought.
While the measure is described as “clean,” we know the leaders could promise to add pet projects to other bills.
(Anyone else tired of the words clean and clear? I know I am!)
But the extension has to pass the “rule vote” to make it to a vote:
A “rule vote” is effectively a test vote which, if successful, allows lawmakers to debate and then weigh a given measure. But rule votes traditionally fall along partisan lines, meaning the speaker will only be able to lose one GOP vote to still advance the Section 702 reauthorization without support from Democrats.
At least two House Republicans, Reps. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., and Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., are already threatening to vote against the rule. Both are leveraging their support on Senate passage of the SAVE America Act, an unrelated Trump-backed election integrity measure.
Congress made changes to FISA in 2024, but a few believe the changes did not go far enough.
Republican Reps. Chip Roy (TX), Keith Self (TX), Warren Davidson (OH), and Andy Ogles (TN) want major reforms to ensure that Americans don’t end up in the process:
“They’re going to have to allow amendments, because there is a lot of appetite for reform,” Davidson said, adding that he would oppose the bill if it goes unchanged.
“There are indications that the warrantless approach is still not working,” added Self in an interview this week.
Johnson disagrees with Self: “Last time it was up for reauthorization, we instituted 56 substantive reforms to FISA. By every measure and review, those are working just as we planned. We’ve not had the abuses that were happening before those reforms.”
Whatever. I don’t believe you.
Lawmakers have been using the conflicts in the Middle East to justify extending FISA.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) opposed the extension in 2024, but will happily vote for it this year: “It’s a whole different context today — 2026, not 2024. And you know, we got something like 56 reforms in the legislation last year, and they’ve made a huge difference. I think it’s a completely different framework.”
Benjamin Franklin: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
Yeah, the only proper change would be to end FISA Section 207.
Surveilling any American citizen without a warrant violates the Fourth Amendment.
The Supreme Court refuses to hear all cases related to FISA. The justices know that it violates the Fourth Amendment.
What a bunch of wimps.
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Comments
We need to have that speaker reconed… 🙂
And replaced with whom? Who will be acceptable to the rest of the Republican House members?
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While facetious, the non-facetious analogy is that speaker reconing doesn’t involve replacing the speaker, merely replacing the defective components with new.
In the case of Johnson, a simple caning would likely suffice… 🙂
(Speaker reconing (also spelled re-coning) is a specialized repair process for audio speakers (woofers, subwoofers, or full-range drivers). It restores a damaged or worn-out speaker to near-new condition by replacing all the moving parts while keeping the original heavy, expensive frame and magnet assembly.)
Ah, now I understand the pun (good one, BTW).
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Never been with a woman long enough
For my speakers to get old
We been together so long now they both need reconed…
I heard Trump is going to declare Marshall Tucker…
heard it in a love song…
Can’t be wrong….
It really does come down to them, the grifter oligarch class of Republicans and Democrats, and the rest of us. They will not do what they don’t want to do, no matter how strongly the “people” want it. FISA? The entire Patriot Act needs to be shredded. DHS needs to be broken up into its native constituencies–the ones we still need. The rest, most especially the utterly corrupt FBI, need to go away. I try to be charitable. But government is simply a cancer eating away on the body politic.
Johnson is contemptible.
Like Paul RINO Ryan, and John RINO Bonehead before him.
All other things equal, they should just get rid of the entire Patriot act. It is the most unpatriotic thing Congress has ever passed
so is the civil rights act of 1965 but pols have got to play their games to keep themselves in power
dems laugh at us for even tryingggg to make some morally legit
the dems just do what they want and dont worry about what consequences the might face
If not thrown out entirely the Patriot act needs much more reform, primarily greater protection for individual Citizens by requiring FISA warrant applications to include all exculpatory info to 3 person panel v a single individual, greater transparency by requiring release of FISA material to the subject within six months unless that 3 person panel unanimously approves a subsequent 6 month extension. A special master as an IG with full access to proactively audit the process with any delay/lack of.cooperation creating a presumption of guilt.
Reminder. The demonrats and Obama used the patriot act to surveil President Trump through a bogus predicate via the Australian Ambassador. It’s way past time to sunset this act. As well as make it a crime to use 5 Eyes countries to surveil Americans per requests from the alphabet agencies.
Quite a bit of political theater here. As I mentioned in a few other posts, technology has overtaken what were considered the normal boundaries of surveillance. It will be almost impossible to put this one back in the bottle. Back when Obama was in office I invented, patented and implemented some of the techniques needed to do the snooping on compressed data streams… and nobody has asked me to forget about or unimplement anything.
Now the hardware is 100X as powerful and the software is better.
New sorts of regulations are required, ones that specifically deal with the radical changes in technology. Otherwise they may as well be writing regulations on the color of the buggy whips for horse carriages.
Democrats used this to spy on Carter Page and such warrants allow spying on everyone the target associates with, and everyone those people associate with. Two degrees of separation.
The result was that they spied on the entire Trump campaign, including the candidate. And this was extended, repeatedly, until 3+ years into his first term.
The IG report showed that the FBI lied to the FISA court not just for this, but for EVERY warrant they had ever obtained.
As a result – absolutely nothing changed. Not one agent was punished, and zero changes were implemented to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
No Republican should ever vote for this. And, there are plenty of legal options already in place to spy on actual foreigners who are real threats.
They ought to scrap this entire system and, if really needed (its not) come up with a new process that isn’t 100% corrupt.
Oh, by all means, renew 702 …, but amend it to include criminal penalties of 10 years and $250K fine for ANYONE (AIDMA) who so much as thinks about misusing the law, along with a civil suit option, including punitive damages and attorney fees, for any FISA seeker and others, including judges, who lie or otherwide abuse the process of up to $10M per violation per injured party. Drop the hammer.
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