Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act expires in six days. The Senate has no floor vote scheduled. [1] The paper's Thursday seven-days note carried the same condition; Friday's check subtracts one day of calendar and adds nothing else. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's public schedule for next week lists committee markups, two budget-resolution procedural votes, and a nomination cloture motion. It does not list a Section 702 reauthorization. Minority Leader John Thune's office, asked Thursday and again Friday morning, has not responded. The April 17 stopgap that extended the authority by ten days from the original April 20 expiration was, on its own terms, a mechanism to buy time. The time has been purchased. It has not been used.

The rebel caucus composition has not shifted since Wednesday. Senator Rand Paul's office confirmed Friday morning that his position is unchanged: no clean reauthorization, no 18-month extension without significant civil-liberties reforms. [2] Senator Ron Wyden's office repeated the February statement that Section 702 "requires significant reform before extension." The Lee-Durbin joint op-ed in the New York Times on April 17 — the cross-ideological signal event that defined the reform caucus — has not been followed by a floor amendment, a committee markup, or a unanimous-consent request. [3] The senators have a bill. They have not forced the vote.

What a compressed week actually looks like, procedurally, has a narrow set of options. Schumer can bring a clean 18-month reauthorization to the floor under Rule XIV and try to rush it over Paul's objection — at the cost of visible procedural aggression against the rebel caucus, which the leadership has so far avoided. He can bring a longer stopgap to the floor and kick the cliff another thirty or sixty days, shifting the issue past the May recess. He can bring the Lee-Durbin reform bill itself, which would require votes on several civil-liberties amendments the administration opposes. Or he can run the clock and watch Section 702 authority lapse, producing the first statutory surveillance gap of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act era. The choice has not visibly been made. Silence is compatible with any of the four.

The war-authorization architecture shapes the calculation. Iran-track diplomatic talks remain frozen on Tehran's blockade-relief precondition; Lebanon Round Two produced a three-week ceasefire extension announced Thursday from the White House. The executive branch has strong operational reasons to want Section 702 continuity through the active coercion window. That preference, applied to the Senate floor, would argue for an aggressive leadership posture. The aggressive leadership posture has not materialized. The administrative preference and the legislative pace are not tracking each other this week. Which one yields by Tuesday is the operational question.

Tuesday is April 28. The cliff is Thursday, April 30. If a floor vote is to happen before the cliff, it is now a Monday-through-Thursday window with no advance notice, no manager's amendment public, and no vote-count whip sheet reported. Congressional floor operations can move quickly in a crisis; they can also move slowly enough for a statutory deadline to pass. The last surveillance-authority lapse, the 2020 USA Freedom Act expiration, lasted approximately two weeks. The political cost of the lapse was absorbed by both parties. Section 702's lapse, if it happens, will be tested against an active wartime environment the 2020 lapse did not include. The six-day clock ticks with that fact silently held.

-- SAMUEL CRANE, Washington