Yesterday MAGA Mike and his team tried passing the rule to permit a vote to reauthorize FISA by packaging it with 3 other bills and resolutions popular with far right extremists and MAGA loons. But the extreme right MAGAts, publicly urged on by Señor Trumpanzee, weren’t fooled. 19 of them tanked the rule and it failed 193 to 228, the seventh rule that has failed on the House floor since the dysfunctional 118th Congress began. Let’s start with a list of the 19 Republicans who abandoned MAGA Mike:
Andy Biggs (R-AZ)
Dan Bishop (R-NC)
Lauren Boebert (R-CO)
Tim Burchett (R-TN)
Michael Cloud (R-TX)
Eli Crane (R-AZ)
Matt Gaetz (R-FL)
Bob Good (R-VA)
Paul Gosar (R-AZ)
Clay Higgins (R-LA)
Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL)
Nancy Mace (R-SC)
Cory Mills (R-FL)
Ralph Norman (R-SC)
Andy Ogles (R-TN)
Scott Perry (R-PA)
Matt Rosendale (R-MT)
Chip Roy (R-TX)
Greg Steube (R-FL)
Oddly, Marjorie Traitor Greene voted for the rule. So did several other extremists, like Byron Donalds (FL), Randy Jackson (TX), Thomas Massie (KY), Barry Moore (AL), Josh Brecheen (OK), Diana Harshbarger (TN), Troy Nehls (TX) and Eric Burlison (MO). Trump’s order:
DWT has been covering the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) at least since 2008. We’ve never liked it and we still don’t, even if it puts us on the same side with Trump for a moment. It’s a warrantless domestic spying program, secretly begun by the Bush-Cheney regime in 2002 and exposed in 2005. Progressives have been fighting it ever since. It expires next week. FANTASTIC!
A quartet of NBC News reporters wrote that “The current FISA tool allows the government to conduct targeted surveillance of foreign nationals, without needing to obtain a warrant, with a higher bar for targeted American citizens. The new House Republican bill calls for a number of reforms but doesn't go far enough in the eyes of privacy and civil liberties advocates, on both the right and left… The contentious issue dominated a closed-door gathering of House Republicans on Wednesday morning. In that meeting, Johnson warned Republican lawmakers they would get jammed with a short-term FISA extension from the Senate, without the reforms included in the House GOP bill, if members vote down the rule… Although most Democrats and the White House support extending FISA, House Democrats don't intend to provide votes for the rule because of partisan language tucked into it. In addition to the FISA bill, the rule contains a Republican resolution on Israel that criticizes President Joe Biden for pressuring the country to change its war strategy after the strike on a World Central Kitchen aid convoy.”
I was relieved to see that the Congressional Progressive Caucus still opposes extending FISA, citing abuses that led to hundreds of thousands of FBI searches for personal information of U.S. persons, unrelated to foreign intelligence operations. Progressives have their own bill, the Government Surveillance Reform Act which requires law enforcement to secure a warrant before searching U.S. individuals' data, outlaws law enforcement purchase of U.S. individuals' data from brokers without a warrant and prohibits “reverse targeting,” the monitoring of foreign individuals outside the U.S. as a pretext to surveil U.S. persons within the country.