Republican leaders missed another procedural window to push through a renewal of the federal foreign-surveillance law, with hardliners demanding warrant requirements and other privacy guardrails.
House and Senate Republicans missed another procedural window to advance reauthorization of the federal foreign-surveillance law, with the deadline now days away and hardliners showing no sign of backing down on demands for warrant requirements and additional privacy guardrails.
The fight is intra-party, not just inter-party. Conservative members want explicit limits on the kind of incidental collection that has scandalized civil-liberties groups for a decade, plus carve-outs around digital-currency surveillance and AI-assisted analysis of US persons. Leadership has been reluctant to accept the full package.
On the Democratic side, a small but vocal group of senators has been working with the conservative caucus on warrant language, an unusual cross-aisle alignment that has surprised vote-counters in both chambers.
A short-term extension is now openly discussed as a fallback. National-security officials say even a brief lapse would be operationally damaging; civil-liberties advocates say it would be the first real chance to renegotiate the law in a generation.