House GOP bridges divide to reauthorize controversial surveillance bill

House GOP leadership’s goal to pass the bill by the end of this week almost did not happen after 19 far-right Republicans blocked debate on the measure Wednesday by voting against advancing beyond a procedural hurdle. The group took advantage of Republicans’ narrow two-vote majority to protest failure to meet their demands to incorporate changes to the bill.

The divisions stem from a debate over how to amend Section 702 of the FISA law. The post-9/11 provision gave U.S. spy agencies the ability to surveil only noncitizens abroad who are suspected of threatening national security. At issue is whether spy agencies can analyze communications by Americans who may have interacted with the foreign target, which privacy advocates on the far right and left say is unconstitutional.

The group that blocked debate on the bill Wednesday wanted Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to include language to bar U.S. government agencies from buying Americans’ personal information from private data brokers and to require U.S. agencies to obtain a warrant before viewing communications by U.S. citizens swept up in overseas intelligence gathering.

While Johnson included neither objective in the bill put up for floor debate Friday, he nonetheless found a solution Thursday that appeased the hard-liners, agreeing to shorten the reauthorization window from five to two years. The speaker argued that doing so would allow far-right members a chance to incorporate their legislative changes under a Trump administration, if the former president is elected later this year.

Johnson also promised a vote on a separate bill next week that would ban U.S. agencies from purchasing information on American citizens from data companies.

The changes were enough to persuade hard-liners to drop their blockade Friday, allowing floor debate to proceed. But it did not prevent a suspenseful moment on the House floor when an amendment almost led to the adoption of language that would have forced the government to require a warrant if the FBI wants to analyze Americans’ communications swept up under Section 702. Members of the far-right House Freedom Caucus were enthusiastically cheering and clapping for members of the far-left “Squad” and Congressional Progressive Caucus as they voted for the amendment.

The amendment, offered by a political odd couple, Reps. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) and Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), was not adopted, as it ended in a tie vote. The amendment would have dramatically changed the bill, likely rendering it dead on arrival in the Senate. According to three Democrats familiar with the development, the White House whipped House Democrats to vote against it. After it failed, House Intelligence Chairman Michael R. Turner (R-Ohio) quietly celebrated briefly in the Speaker’s Lobby behind the House floor.

Privacy and national security hawks have warred within the conference for months over how to address changes to Section 702, leading Johnson to twice pull consideration of several measures due to lagging support. Those arguing on the side of privacy say government agencies should require a warrant, while national-security-minded Republicans — and Democrats — say that adding warrants would severely affect agencies’ ability to thwart potential terrorist activity.

The Biden administration has for months stressed the need to reauthorize Section 702, one of the most powerful foreign surveillance authorities in its arsenal. Section 702 provides more than 60 percent of the intelligence in the president’s daily brief, administration officials have said.

Section 702 “contributed directly to us being able to take [al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-] Zawahiri off the battlefield,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Friday. It helped identify the perpetrator of the ransomware attack against Colonial Pipeline, he said. “It helped us uncover Russian atrocities in Ukraine, including the forced relocation to Russia of Ukrainian children and attacks on Ukrainian refugees. And it helped us disrupt an assassination plot on U.S. soil against a dissident by a hostile foreign power.”

Kirby added: “It’s vital to our ability to defend ourselves, to defend the American people.”

Bipartisan members of the House Intelligence Committee dominated floor debate to voice their support for the bill and encourage colleagues to vote against a bipartisan amendment supported by far left and right members that would prohibit warrantless searching of citizens’ communications “with exceptions for imminent threats to life or bodily harm, consent searches, or known cybersecurity threat signatures.”

“There already is a warrant requirement for the protection of Americans and people who are here in the United States, ” Turner said. “This amendment … applies to the data that we collect in spying on Hamas, Hezbollah, the Chinese Communist Party. To give them a warrant, to give them constitutional protection, means they are open for business.”

That did not stop former president Donald Trump’s supporters in the House from falsely claiming that without reforms, the “weaponized” Justice Department under President Biden will continue to target Trump and other conservatives.

“The question today is, ‘do you trust the government?’” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said. “The same intelligence community that spied on President Trump’s campaign has been deeply invested in reauthorizing FISA. … These are also the same people in the intelligence community who abused FISA and spied on hundreds of thousands of Americans, and I would argue, they’ll continue to do it.”

In response, Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Tex.), a former Navy SEAL, devoted time on the floor to separate myths from facts.

“Myth: FISA is used to spy on Americans. The myth goes like this — if you queried an American’s name, you can see their inbox, but it’s not true. It’s used to spy on foreign intelligence targets, foreign terrorists, and you need a warrant to do so,” he said. “The reforms in here would stop in their tracks what happened to President Trump.”

Ellen Nakashima, Leigh Ann Caldwell and Liz Goodwin contributed to this report.