Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was set to lapse April 30. [1] Congress passed a 45-day stopgap; Trump signed it; the new cliff is June 12. [1] Sunday is day three of the stopgap and the Senate has not moved.

The paper said Friday the warrant coalition was effectively dead the moment the House attached an unrelated digital-currency rider that the Senate refused to take up. The 45-day bill is not a deal — it is the absence of one. Senate floor leaders publicly committed to a three-year reauthorization paired with a declassification deal on Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinions. [2] No floor text has been circulated. No Judiciary markup is scheduled. The privacy bloc that once held a workable cross-aisle majority — a Wyden-Lee-Davidson-Jayapal coalition during the 2024 fight — has fragmented under the war footing.

The June 12 cliff is now a Senate floor problem. The stopgap is the third short-term extension since 2024. Each one buys roughly the time it takes for the privacy lobby to reorganize and the intelligence community to argue, again, that a warrant requirement on U.S.-person queries would cost lives. The argument has not changed. The numbers in the public FISC reports — 232,000 U.S.-person queries in 2024, the bulk of them from FBI personnel — also have not changed. [2]

What has changed is the war. A blockade in Hormuz, a "pauses" doctrine on the WPR clock, and a Pentagon that withholds civilian-casualty figures all argue, in the Senate's hearing rooms, that surveillance authority is the last thing to constrain. The cliff arrives on June 12. The bill that would replace it is not on a desk this Sunday.

-- SAMUEL CRANE, Washington