By David Morgan, Raphael Satter and AJ Vicens
WASHINGTON, April 29 (Reuters) – The U.S. government’s effort to renew its warrantless domestic surveillance powers cleared the House of Representatives on Wednesday, after House Speaker Mike Johnson and Trump administration officials persuaded Republican holdouts to back the bill.
The renewal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act now goes to the Senate, where it faces a potentially rough reception because it was attached to unrelated legislation that would restrict the Federal Reserve’s ability to issue digital currency – something Senate Majority Leader John Thune has described as a non-starter.
The White House and Congressional leadership have piled pressure on recalcitrant lawmakers to endorse FISA, which has drawn bipartisan skepticism because a provision in the law – Section 702 – allows authorities to bypass warrant requirements before rifling through vast hauls of Americans’ communication data. U.S. spy chiefs have long defended the program, saying it provides an irreplaceable surveillance tool.
Lawmakers’ concerns over the warrantless spying have in past years repeatedly delayed attempts to renew the surveillance authority, although the intelligence community and its allies always won in the end.
The 2024 effort to renew the spy power only succeeded on its fourth attempt, and a proposal to require U.S. law enforcement to get a judicial sign-off before searching the intercepted data failed in the House of Representatives by a single vote.
This time the vote was not nearly as close, with lawmakers backing a warrantless version of the power by a vote of 235 to 191.
Patrick Eddington, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, said that the House had “voted to continue subverting the Fourth Amendment” – which is meant to protect Americans against arbitrary searches.
Johnson and Trump administration personnel had to intervene on the House floor, flipping several “noes” to “yeses” in a procedural vote ahead of the bill’s passage later in the day. But Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said the likely Senate impasse over the bill’s restrictions on digital currency meant reauthorization remained in limbo.
Wednesday’s bill “could prove to be a Pyrrhic victory for Johnson,” she said.
(Writing by Raphael Satter; Editing by Rod Nickel, Edmund Klamann and Christopher Cushing)
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