Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act expires Thursday, April 30. Speaker Mike Johnson's House plan, as reported by the Washington Examiner Friday and confirmed Sunday by Hill aides, is to bring a three-year reauthorization through the Rules Committee on Monday and to the floor by Tuesday or Wednesday. [1] Saturday's paper read at five days to the cliff said the rebel caucus had not produced a public statement since the April 17 stopgap. Sunday adds the substantive line: the bill arriving in the Rules Committee Monday does not contain the warrant requirement that the rebel caucus has demanded for a year.

That is the structural failure. Senator Mike Lee and Senator Dick Durbin's SAFE Act, reintroduced February 23, requires a FISA Title I order or a warrant before any government agency accesses the content of Americans' communications collected under Section 702. [3] Lee and Senator Ron Wyden's Government Surveillance Reform Act, reintroduced March 12, extends the protection to private data acquired from commercial brokers. Neither bill is the vehicle Johnson is bringing Monday. The vehicle Johnson is bringing is a clean three-year reauthorization with what the Examiner describes as "small reforms" — query auditing, congressional notification thresholds, retention adjustments — none of which require a warrant for U.S.-person queries. [1][3]

The vote arithmetic is worse than the urgency would suggest. The April 17 ten-day stopgap passed at 2 a.m. on the House floor after a five-year bill collapsed. [2] AP's account of that night put the rebel-caucus count at roughly two dozen House Republicans willing to vote no on a reauthorization without warrant language, plus a parallel bloc of progressive Democrats who would vote no for civil-liberties reasons. Together, that is enough to deny Johnson a Republican-only majority. He needs Democrats. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has not committed Democrats to a clean reauthorization; the price he has named, in caucus discussions, is exactly the warrant requirement Johnson's Monday bill omits. [2]

The Senate has not scheduled a vote at all. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's published schedule for the week lists committee markups, two budget-resolution procedural votes, and a nomination cloture motion. None of those is a Section 702 vehicle. [3] If the House passes a reauthorization Tuesday or Wednesday and sends it to the Senate, Schumer would have at most 24 to 36 hours to clear the floor before midnight Thursday. Senator Rand Paul has, since Friday, kept his cloture-objection posture intact. Without unanimous consent, even an emergency reauthorization would require a procedural runway the calendar does not contain.

What the rebel caucus is actually doing is the question Sunday cannot answer. Lee posted no statement Saturday. Wyden's office repeated the February formula. Massie's office referred reporters to his published opposition to extending 702 without warrant language. None of these is a folding signal; none is a hardening one. The pattern across two prior cliffs — 2023's NDAA-attached extension and April 2024's two-year reauthorization — was the same: rebel caucus loud, leadership negotiates, floor produces a procedural extension that defers the substantive vote. The third instance of that pattern would be a stopgap or a concession that adds a watered version of the warrant clause.

The wartime layer is the new variable. An Iran collection priority that has not been formally disclosed sits inside the urgency Johnson is invoking. That priority is the leverage leadership is using on the rebels. It is also the reason a lapse this year is more politically expensive than a lapse in 2020, when the USA Freedom Act briefly expired without consequence. [3] By Wednesday night, either the rebels have produced a warrant amendment that reaches the floor, or the floor has produced a stopgap that defers the fight again. Sunday is not yet the day the fight ends. It is the day the bill arrives without the clause that would settle it.

-- SAMUEL CRANE, Washington