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House Speaker Mike Johnson called the vote at midnight on Friday, and called on lawmakers to return to the chamber after midnight in an effort to preserve the Constitution. Monitoring programme Allows federal agents to read Americans’ communications without a warrant. Twenty Republicans broke ranks and sank the party, a sharp rebuke to both Johnson and President Donald Trump, who personally spent the week working on opponents to support the bill.
The failed vote culminates weeks of bipartisan resistance to clean reauthorization of the surveillance program, authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The program allows 702 Eavesdropping on communications They ostensibly belong to foreigners abroad, but they have also been known to intercept massive amounts of Americans’ emails, text messages, phone calls and other data – private messages routinely sent by the FBI and other agencies. Access without a warrant.
Congressional authorization for the program is set to expire on Tuesday. White House and GOP leadership have spent weeks pushing to reinstate the “clean” authorization, pushing back against a bipartisan coalition of progressive Democrats in the House Freedom Caucus demanding, in various ways, that the FBI obtain warrants before searching Americans’ messages and that Congress prohibit the government from purchasing Americans’ personal data. From commercial intermediaries.
A bunch of Democrats Led by Congressman Jim Himes The Connecticut lawmaker, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, joined the White House in pushing against the new restrictions.
House Republicans revolted twice in the early hours of Friday morning, ultimately sinking the bill. Shortly after 1 a.m. ET, dozens of Republicans joined nearly every Democrat To kill the amendment supported by the leadership It would have extended Section 702 for another five years.
the amendment It contained a provision that was essentially a fictitious warrant requirement. It would have prevented government officials from “intentionally” targeting Americans’ communications without a warrant, conduct already prohibited under the law. It also offered the government a path to arrest if agents had probable cause to suspect that a person was an agent of a foreign power—a power that already existed independently of the Section 702 program and functionally added nothing new to the law.
the The final blow That came just after 2 a.m., when 20 Republicans voted again to block the original version of the bill, which sought a shorter 18-month extension. Those 20 votes were drawn almost entirely from the House Freedom Caucus and the party’s libertarian wing, including Andy Harris of Maryland, the caucus’ chairman; Thomas Massey of Kentucky; Chip Roy of Texas; Warren Davidson of Ohio; and Lauren Boebert from Colorado.
In a rare defeat in a procedural vote that usually passes along party lines, GOP leaders walked out with just a 10-day extension, pushing the fight to the end of the month. The House’s failure leaves the Senate to decide what comes next, starting with approving the extension next week.
The vote’s collapse came after a week of strenuous efforts by the Trump administration to placate Republicans who objected to the FBI’s warrantless access and its documented history of querying that data. For political purposes. Trump hosted Freedom Rally opponents at the White House on Tuesday, in an attempt to close the deal. Meanwhile, Democrats were briefed Monday by two former senior Biden officials urging them to support an extension, according to a person familiar with both events.
The FBI used Section 702 data to conduct warrantless inquiries into a U.S. senator, 19,000 congressional campaign donors, Black Lives Matter protesters, and both sides in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, according to declassified court rulings and government transparency reports.