A bill to amend the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to extend the authorities of title VII of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, and for other purposes.

Mr. Speaker, I do not oppose the motion.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

The Senate just unanimously passed this 43-day extension. Yesterday I was struck by a point my colleagues from the House Intelligence Committee made here on the House floor that the FISA 702 authorities were too important to turn off. We agree. But I also know that we cannot turn off our constitutional values and principles.

Nothing about protecting our safety should prevent us from protecting our rights. We can have both. When we talk about protecting civil liberties, we are not speaking of theoretical threats. We are talking of real violations perpetrated by the FBI, not just in 2022, but over the past year and still going on today.

The March 2026 FISC opinion describing the FISC judge's concerns about the FBI's violations of FISA is still classified by an administration that seems intent on keeping the public in the dark as we debate this fundamental problem.

We can say with some confidence that the FBI has no idea how many U.S. person queries they ran last year, how many times they spied on American citizens. We should not have to take this vote without being able to explain these serious deficiencies. We have a right to know how many times the communications of American citizens were accessed.

Every day that goes by where the Trump administration and Kash Patel's FBI can circumvent our constitutional values to spy on American citizens is one day too many. I won't oppose this short extension but only because it is my fervent hope and determination that it will give us the time to work together across the aisle to implement meaningful reform.

It is long past time for Speaker Johnson to stop blocking Members of this body from coming together across party lines to work in good faith to strike a bipartisan deal on section 702 that is the support of a robust, bipartisan majority which believes that the program is important for foreign intelligence but must be made consistent with the essential constitutional values of our privacy rights under the Constitution.

A significant majority of Members in this Chamber, Democrats and Republicans alike, want real reforms to protect Americans' privacy and civil liberties, not the paltry restatements of current law that have been offered to us so far.

The vast majority of Members of this body and the American people want a Federal judge, not an FBI agent or an FBI lawyer, to stand between them and their private communications. That is the constitutional design. You go to a judge. You don't leave it to the executive branch itself to check its own behavior.

The Speaker must allow the House to work its will. The Speaker must allow the House to serve the American people, to bring to the floor legislation that lives up to the spirit of the Fourth Amendment and ensures Americans are protected from their government as the Founders intended.

So as a gesture of good faith, we will give a few-week extension here, but we would love the Speaker of the House to get serious and allow us to have meaningful, bipartisan negotiation and compromise.

I have heard from so many distinguished Republican Members over there, including a number of former Federal prosecutors, who say: We can work this thing out. Let us do the people's business, and let's work it out.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I thank my friend from Kentucky for his always unswerving leadership on behalf of constitutional values, privacy, and the civil rights and civil liberties of the people.

The question here is how are we actually going to move the Speaker, who seems to be immersed in some combination of inertia, bureaucracy, and chaos, and the Senate, which doesn't seem to be living up to its traditional role in trying to reconcile our foreign policy and national security agenda with the constitutional values of the people?

We are saying, let's give it a few weeks now. I hope that Chairman Jordan will echo my endorsement of us really getting together to have bipartisan negotiations and compromise on this. This is not a partisan problem. We have people on all sides of this on both sides of the aisle. The vast majority of the Democrats want to make sure that we have a program that protects the privacy rights and the civil liberties of the people.

No, we do not trust Kash Patel to have conversations with Tulsi Gabbard as a successful substitute for the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. I am sure you don't trust whoever you would liken to Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard on our side.

That is fine. That is partisan politics. That is why we want this to rest on

some level of constitutional principles that will cut across party lines.

Let's take a few weeks to have serious, meaningful discussion. As a gesture of good faith, we say we will work with the Speaker if the Speaker will work with us.

We see him conducting negotiations in the middle of votes on the House floor. How about we all get together the way that Congress is supposed to and have meaningful discussion and dialogue? Let's do the same thing with people in the Senate.

I challenge the Members of the Senate to stand up for a system that the American people can believe in. We simply cannot leave it up to Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard and Donald Trump to enforce our civil rights and civil liberties for us. That is not going to work. They are partisan actors. They have proven themselves to be partisan actors, and they don't make any bones about that. They are unashamed of it. That is fine. Then we need to put principles in place that are going to protect the American people.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

The critical point is that we need to have a judge standing between the FBI and the private communications of the American people. This has got to be the essential constitutional value that is vindicated here. We need to interpose the authority and the independence of a judge between the FBI and the communications of the people.

The reform that my friend from Texas just mentioned is to have Kash Patel report his abuses to Tulsi Gabbard. If you think that is a good substitute for the Fourth Amendment, well, then you can go with what the gentleman was talking about, which was this 3-year extension. We are not willing go with the 3-year extension. 191 of us voted against it, including a dozen Republicans.

We are willing to give you 40 more days or 45 more days for us to negotiate this thing, if the Speaker will actually sit down with us. We want the Speaker to sit down with us, and we want the Senate to take its constitutional responsibilities seriously here.

The privacy rights of the people are too essential, and the privacy rights of the people should not be pitted against the national security interests of the country.

We can make this happen if we are willing to get rid of all of the chaos and the pandemonium that we have seen over the last several days and simply sit down and have a meaningful conversation and write the legislation.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, we can reconcile the essential constitutional values of the country with the national security of the country. This 45-day continuation is a mandate. It is a mandate to the Speaker to allow the House to finally come together to develop compromise legislation that guarantees that judges--not Kash Patel, not Tulsi Gabbard, and not Donald Trump--will be the ones to ensure our privacy and our civil liberties.

Let's use this period to engage in real legislative compromise and negotiation in the interests of the American people.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I claim the time in actual opposition to the motion.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I rise in opposition to this clean reauthorization of FISA and, in particular, to this short-term authorization of FISA.

A short-term infringement of the Constitution is still an infringement of the Constitution. How long has the Senate had to act on this? Is this an emergency? Is this something we haven't known about? No.

I appreciate the work of my dear colleague and chairman of our committee, Mr. Jordan, on this issue for so many years of trying to get warrants before Americans are spied upon. In fact, my colleague on the other side of the aisle Zoe Lofgren and I, over a decade ago, were successful in passing an amendment to FISA, during the appropriations process, that would have prohibited funds to be used in the FISA program without a warrant.

What happened to that amendment? It died in the Senate. They have had over a decade to work on this.

What does FISA stand for? Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

This, when it was originated, was never meant to be used to surveil Americans or to search through databases for their information. It was intended for foreign intelligence. But now it is used on Americans without a warrant.

FISA databases have been used to query political activists, journalists, Members of Congress and their staff, and random romantic interests of FBI agents. We are told: Oh, don't worry. It is not being abused anymore. Maybe that is because they changed the definition of a query. So when they use the program anymore and abuse it, it is not a query by their definition so they don't have to tell you when they have violated the law. They are interpreting it differently.

As a matter of fact, there is a secret interpretation of how this law is used by the FBI, so secret that you have got to go three floors underground to read about it. We can't tell the American public exactly how they are being spied on, but it is a particularly nefarious way. I think it is also unconstitutional. I know it is also unconstitutional.

For this and many other reasons, I oppose this FISA reauthorization, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, my friend and colleague on the Judiciary Committee and also on the Rules Committee, Chip Roy, has labored tirelessly to defend the constitutional rights of his constituents in Texas and all Americans.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Roy).

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

After observing the FBI and other intelligence agencies spy on Members of Congress, including Members who are in this debate right now, I am at a loss to understand why both Democrats and Republicans are arguing for a clean reauthorization of this program that has clearly been used to overstep the boundaries of the other branch of government.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Davidson), who serves on the Finance Committee and has warned us about the Orwellian dangers and powers of the central bank digital currency.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Self), my good friend and colleague and staunch defender of the Constitution.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, what are we opposed to?

We are opposed to violating the Constitution. That is what is happening with FISA. It is happening with other provisions of law and court rulings.

Mr. Speaker, the third-party doctrine allows the government to go after your phone records without a warrant with a simple subpoena, go after your health records, and go after your bank records. That needs to be reformed.

We need to end the mandate on electronic kill switches in cars, the Orwellian technology that would be the judge, the jury, and the executioner, shut your car off midstream and mid-drive if some AI in your dashboard determines that you shouldn't be driving at that moment, Mr. Speaker, or maybe the government determines that.

There is a whole slew of ways that Americans' privacy, Fourth Amendment rights and other rights are being violated. Chief among them is the FISA 702 program. We should not do a clean reauthorization of this program.

Mr. Speaker, what would happen if you vote ``no'' today?

Maybe there are some people wondering: How will I vote?

Maybe they don't need my vote. Maybe it is going to pass. This has to pass with two-thirds vote.

What would happen if it did fail today?

The Senate would go back to work. They are trying to punt. They want to go home, leave town, and leave us with the work of this.

We have done our work. We have done it for years. We have sent them versions of this, and yet, they insist on another clean reauthorization.

Mr. Speaker, I object to that.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Roy).

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. Speaker, it is nice to have the gentleman from Maryland on the pro-warrant side of this conversation this go-round.

I will note that there was a significant amount of abuses by the previous President with respect to the amount of focus on the American people using FISA and the abuses therein.

I hope we can achieve a bipartisan consensus here on how we reform this regardless of who is in the White House and regardless of who controls Congress. We need to do that in defense of the Constitution.

The reason I rise in opposition is because this body, this House, spoke and sent a bill to the Senate that has reforms that our Intelligence Committee chair worked on and a number of people worked on. We had reforms on there to stop the central bank digital currency. We sent it to the Senate, and they didn't even give it a vote. They didn't even put it on the floor for consent. They just said: Stuff it. We are going to send you a 45-day extension.

By the way, 45 days, which takes it to June 12, which some of us several weeks ago said: Let's do a 60-day extension and let's sit down and work, like the gentleman from Maryland said. That is what we ought to do.

We should go to committee. We should have a full-throated debate in committee. We should amend it. We should have a debate about warrants. We should have a debate about protecting the American people from the abuse of power by government.

My colleague from Texas, my friend over here, Mr. Cloud, he came into a meeting and he said the intel community never walks in, ever, saying: We have all of this power to collect information. Oh, we are going to give it back.

That never happens. The only way that happens is if we act, if this body acts, the people's Representatives.

Mr. Speaker, the question I would ask is: How much warrantless surveillance, how much spying on American citizens should we allow? How much? How much is acceptable? Because right now we know for sure there is warrantless collection of information on the American people.

We have other issues we have got to deal with: the kill switch, surveillance in automobiles, central bank digital currency, tracking what we spend, how we spend it, and what we can buy.

This body ought to be defending the people of the United States against the power of government being used against us. Under no circumstances should we allow technology to breach the wall that the Fourth Amendment created that the government is not supposed to go through to get into your personal business, to get into your homes, to look at your information, and to breach the privacy that you are guaranteed to not have the Fourth Amendment break.

I rise in opposition to this. We should move forward and actually try to get actual debate on this. But I do not accept what the Senate is doing to step over what the House did earlier. The Senate should take up that bill and pass it.

Mr. Speaker, the reason I asked for the gentleman to yield to me is precisely the response we just heard.

Do you know what really the problem is, Mr. Speaker?

People want to get home to fundraisers. People want to get home to dinners. People want to go back to their districts and go on trips. They have codels.

Meanwhile, the American people are wondering: What on Earth is happening in this town?

Mr. Speaker, the American people are wondering: What on Earth is happening when they look at this body and see what we failed to do.

We are continuing every single day to drive this entire country into bankruptcy: $40-trillion debt, government spying on the people, failure to stop government spying on the people, kill switches in cars, and failure to stop sugar drinks going to children on the SNAP program voted by both sides of the aisle.

We go home, and the American people say: What are you doing?

Well, here we sit, and the response here is: Please let us get on our flights so we can go home and be away for 10 days while the country suffers because this body doesn't do its job.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object, let me pick up on where I think the majority leader wants to go as well. We have been working hard on the 702 legislation with the kind of lodestar that we want to prove that, for the first time, the government is saying that liberty and security are not mutually exclusive; that we can do both.

To do that, we now have a letter that will be sent very shortly from Chairman Cotton and Ranking Member Warner to the DNI and the Attorney General. I just want to read this--it is very short--into the Record that will reflect this, and then we will have a brief colloquy, the majority leader and I, that is along the lines of what we talked about.

So Chairman Cotton and Ranking Member Warner write to the DNI and the Attorney General:

Earlier this month, the Department of Justice delivered to

Congress a classified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court

(FISC) opinion and order, dated March 17, 2026. Under the

law, your offices are currently conducting a declassification

review for the purposes of making this FISC opinion and order

publicly available, consistent with the protection of sources

and methods, as soon as practicable. In order to inform the

Senate debate on reauthorization of section 702 of the

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, we expect that this

declassification review will be completed, and the FISC

opinion released publicly, within 15 days.

So, again, this is coming from the chairman of our committee, Chairman Cotton, and Senator Warner, our vice chairman. It is going to the DNI and the Attorney General, and to make sure that everybody understands the state of play here, a formal letter is being written, and we are just getting the signatures on that now. Everyone is waiting to hear where things stand.

And with that, let me yield to my colleague the majority leader.

Mr. President, the majority leader states it correctly. That is my understanding as well. The point of this is to have some additional time. This is a very new period in this debate with, for example, AI driving so much of this. And you know, new tools require new rules, and we are going to be able to think about how to proceed with that in the future.

I yield my time. I thank the majority leader for, in effect, reaffirming what we have been working on. I think that this letter from the chair and the ranking member of the Intelligence Committee, where I am proud to serve, to DNI and the Attorney General is a step in the right direction.

I yield the floor.

Mr. Speaker, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is a fine tool for foreign intelligence. Unfortunately, it has been abused and corrupted.

I am encouraged to hear Mr. Raskin reclaim his opposition to warrantless surveillance, and I am encouraged that there is a bipartisan effort to reform it. In fact, I think the will of this body is that we defend the Constitution and we defend this Nation. We can do both. We are presented this false dilemma that somehow if you just abandon your freedom, you can be more secure. That is a false tradeoff.

Freedom surrendered is barely reclaimed, but, by God, we are here to reclaim it today. We want both. We want a warrant to protect the civil liberties of American citizens, and we want the foreign intelligence to be focused on foreign intelligence.

We trust the leaders in the Central Intelligence Agency, the NSA, and others to do what they are supposed to do to target foreigners, but clearly, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has abused their access to this data. They have targeted Americans under all sorts of authorities and not just under 702.

We have come together in a bipartisan way. Frankly, the bill that we sent to the Senate just this week was bipartisan. Not only did it deal with 702, but it dealt with the money. People need to pay attention. The future of the money is going to determine the future.

Central bank digital currency is communist money for the digital age. Unfortunately, some of my Democrat colleagues, who are united in opposition to warrantless surveillance of all forms, somehow don't see the central bank digital currency for what it is. It is the most dystopian surveillance tool ever developed. It corrupts money into

a tool for coercion, surveillance, and control.

We rejected that, and the Senate didn't even give us a debate. John Thune asked to be the leader of the Senate, but he is not leading. He didn't even bring this to the floor for a debate. He keeps throwing up excuse after excuse. Well, I will tell you: Anyone can find an excuse. Leaders find a way. It is time for John Thune to do that or step aside and let somebody lead the Senate who will give us at least a debate but deliver the results the American people have demanded in this election.

Mr. Speaker, I encourage all of our colleagues to come together and defend our Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.