Speaker Johnson, stop playing politics with privacy rights

Every attempt Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) makes to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has ended in failure and humiliation. The only way to escape this Wile E. Coyote-like doom loop is for the Speaker to accept the new political reality: A majority of people on the left and right, both in his caucus and across the nation, want the government to comply with the Constitution and stop bypassing the courts to surveil Americans.

To pass a FISA reauthorization, Johnson needs to stop governing by crisis and finally allow votes on real privacy reforms. 

For weeks, Johnson and the Trump administration have pushed Congress to rubber-stamp a multi-year reauthorization of Section 702 with no meaningful reforms attached. When the House tried to bring a five-year, no-reform extension to the floor last month, 20 Republicans joined with all but four Democrats to block it from even being considered.

Johnson’s response has been to prevent the House from considering any amendments, increase the length of the reauthorization to three years and try again. The three-year extension passed the House in April, but faces an uphill battle in the Senate.

It is time for the speaker to stop playing politics with Section 702. Instead of letting his members propose privacy reform amendments, Johnson keeps hiding behind the mostly cosmetic changes made during the 2024 reauthorization, while relying on the same fearmongering arguments the intelligence community deploys every time Congress considers even modest surveillance reforms. Johnson avoids mentioning the multiple disturbing ways in which the 2024 law expanded surveillance.

Of course, he will not........

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