Senate temporarily extends nation’s controversial spying powers after House fumbles

The Senate quietly extended the nation’s spying powers Friday morning after the House failed to reauthorize the program before the fast-approaching deadline.

The upper chamber’s unanimous vote to extend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) gives Congress a little more breathing room beyond the April 20 deadline but still leaves lawmakers in the same divided place they started.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., had positioned the Senate to swiftly receive and possibly pass a FISA reauthorization, but after progress on the legislation blew up in the House, he's eying putting the upper chamber in the driver's seat. 

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"We can't go dark," Thune said. "We just can't afford to go dark, so we've got to figure it out. Hopefully, we can move a 10-day extension, and we'll try and set things up to try and do something over here." 

The original plan was derailed because of the controversial Section 702 of FISA. On the surface, it allows the government to spy on foreign nationals abroad, but nothing stops that law from collecting data on Americans if they happen to be involved in those communications.

While FISA as a whole is a vital tool for the government, particularly as uncertainty swirls about the true end of the war in Iran, Congress still isn’t on the same page as the White House.

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President Donald Trump and the White House pushed lawmakers to pass a clean reauthorization of the program, which both Republicans and Democrats in both chambers have pushed back against.

It’s a rare horseshoe issue in Washington, D.C., that draws opposite ends of the political spectrum — conservatives and progressives — together on privacy rights.

Opponents of Section 702 want warrant requirements for the government to parse communications involving Americans. Congressional Democrats similarly demanded warrant requirements for immigration agents to enter people’s homes as part of their list of demands to reopen the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

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Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has strongly pushed back against a clean reauthorization, arguing in a letter to his Democratic colleagues that leaps and bounds in AI are "supercharging how the government can surveil Americans."

And Wyden nearly derailed chances for the extension to pass in the upper chamber, but later argued it was the "right decision for today," and that tacking on another few days would give more leverage to lawmakers wanting reforms. 

Wyden told Fox News Digital that "the focus here needs to be what Ben Franklin talked about."

"Anybody who gives up their liberty to have security really doesn't deserve either," Wyden said. "And I don't buy the idea that liberty and security are mutually exclusive, and that's what the proponents, who just want a straight across the board approach are calling for."

"They say, basically, 'The sky's gonna fall, unless you pass our bill right away,'" he continued.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., tried and failed with two options for FISA. One route was a clean, 18-month extension. Another was a five-year extension with modest reforms. Conservatives joined the bulk of House Democrats to tank the latter.

Lawmakers will return next week with a bevy of issues on their plates, including reopening DHS and sprinting to craft the framework for a party-line budget reconciliation package to fund immigration enforcement for the next three years.

The FISA issue will linger until the next deadline at the end of the month.