Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) addresses members of the press following a Democratic weekly policy luncheon at the Capitol April 9, 2024.
Senators in both parties are warning the expanded surveillance authority under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) could lapse after Friday because of a battle over amending the House bill, which has become a target of conservative Republicans and some Democrats.
Opponents of the bill could drag the Senate debate past the 11:59 p.m. Friday deadline, which threatens to cause a lapse in warrantless surveillance authority that some lawmakers warn could leave the nation exposed to an attack at a dangerous time.
“It would be a very big problem. FISA’s incredibly important to alerting us of terrorist plots, for example. And I believe the threat of a terrorist attack is much higher than is being discussed,” warned Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced Monday that he would put the House-passed bill to reauthorize FISA’s controversial Section 702, which empowers the nation’s intelligence agencies to collect the phone numbers of Americans in contact with foreign intelligence targets, on the Senate calendar.
That means it would take more than a week to process the bill on the Senate floor, and opponents of the legislation are threatening to push the debate past the Friday deadline unless they get time to debate and vote on changes to the bill.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), an outspoken critic of the FISA program, said he’s willing to let it lapse over the weekend if he doesn’t get changes to the bill considered on the Senate floor.
“We need to debate — we’ve had five years [to reauthorize the program] — I would think we’ve got time to debate whether or not it’s appropriate for our government to spy on its own citizens without a warrant,” he said.
Paul said he would agree to speed up the process depending on “how much debate the Democrats are willing to allow.”
But he said he would have no problem with letting the program lapse, arguing that the country and its intelligence agencies functioned well enough before Congress passed FISA in 1978.
He dismissed colleagues who are warning that a lapse in authority would expose the nation to attack as “scaremongering.”
Paul and his allies critical of the surveillance program last week were energized when former President Trump urged Congress to “kill FISA.”
