Fallen Servicemembers Religious Heritage Restoration Act

Floor Speech

Mr. Speaker, I urge all of our colleagues, with constitutional patriotism still beating in their hearts after this tortured and demeaning and visibly transactional process we have seen today, to oppose the legislation.

This bill is a 3-year permission slip and blessing for the Trump administration and the next administration to keep abusing the sweeping FISA section 702 surveillance authority to spy on American citizens' private communications and to violate the privacy rights of the people.

I want every Member of this body to be clear on exactly what is in this bill. It has no warrant requirement for queries of U.S. citizens. It has no probable cause requirement. It provides for no judicial oversight of these government queries.

It subjects U.S. citizens to completely subconstitutional standards, avoiding the Fourth Amendment entirely. It is in a parallel universe from the Constitution--or perhaps I should say a perpendicular universe to the Constitution.

The Constitution interposes a judge--a neutral, independent magistrate--between the government and a search of persons and their things. This 3-year blank check to Trump, Patel, and company leaves the executive branch free to conduct these searches with self-reporting and self-policing as the sole protection against their abuse of the section 702 program.

Without any meaningful guardrails, this U.S. person information collected under foreign intelligence standards that have nothing to do with the Fourth Amendment is ripe for abuse. It has been systematically abused to spy on American citizens in the past, and it will be used in exactly the same way by Kash Patel and Todd Blanche in the future if we pass this bill.

Last week, it came to light that FBI Director Kash Patel was unhappy about a New York Times article, which focused on the fact that he had used FBI SWAT teams and jets to chauffeur his girlfriend around the country at taxpayer expense.

What did he do? He didn't decide to change his policy on how he uses the people's resources. Instead, he had his agents query FBI databases for dirt on the reporter.

Was the FISA section 702 program one of the databases he searched? The FBI says no. He just searched every other database at the FBI. We have no idea because they don't have to go to a judge before searching an American citizen's information.

We depend now, in this system, on Kash Patel to be the check and balance against Kash Patel. We only know about the fact that it even happened because a reporter got the information. Otherwise, we wouldn't even have known anything about it.

Let it be a warning to people vigilant about our civil rights and privacy, about what actually goes on.

Even Republicans on the Rules Committee last night were registering their displeasure with these reports.

Look, the FISA section 702 program has been misused and abused under every section. Section 702 authorizes the government to collect information from electronic communication companies in the U.S. about non-U.S. persons who are physically outside the U.S. When the government gets communications to and from these foreign targets, it also incidentally collects large amounts of information about American citizens.

In 2022, the FISC, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, detailed a historical pattern of noncompliant queries at the FBI. Improper searches swept in elected officials, political campaign donors, Black Lives Matter protesters, and many others.

At other agencies, analysts used section 702 to query their own names, the names of their relatives, and even the names of former romantic partners.

Just last month, Federal judges on the FISC issued an opinion to sound the alarm about how the FBI is currently abusing FISA, violating the law and flouting the safeguards Congress imposed 2 years ago to snoop on Americans' private communications. The administration is deliberately keeping this opinion totally classified in a basement SCIF here at the House.

Reforms that we made during the last FISA section 702 reauthorization, which I strongly supported and voted for--unlike my friend Chairman Jordan--those reforms relied on internal watchdogs and required agencies to track and report the use of section 702 data to spy on Americans.

I strongly supported that reform, but, 1 year and change into the Trump administration, the watchdogs are all but gone. After returning to the White House, President Trump quickly removed the internal watchdogs charged with verifying FBI's representations that the reforms are working; he illegally fired a majority of the members of the independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board; and his Department of Justice reassigned other key compliance personnel. The watchdogs have been removed from the scene of the crimes.

The administration repeatedly claims that FBI compliance exceeded 99 percent in 2024 and 2025. Even if those claims are true--and I seriously doubt it--that is an admission that the FBI has illegally accessed the data of thousands of American citizens.

More importantly, these numbers are based on the violations and abuses that Kash Patel and Todd Blanche are willing to identify themselves and self-report. How can we believe these numbers when the administration has returned all the watchdogs to the pound? They are no longer there.

The FISC judges warned us just last month that the FBI is abusing its authorities to spy on Americans, so what makes us think that a 3-year blank check renewal will lead to self-correction?

Proponents of the bill claim that it protects privacy, but asking Kash Patel's FBI to self-report abuses of our civil liberties to Tulsi Gabbard's DNI is like asking Donald Trump to self-report his collection of millions of dollars from foreign governments directly to the U.S. Congress. That is actually the law under Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution, the Foreign Emoluments Clause. Yet, he has never once come to ask for our permission for him to keep a foreign government emolument, whether pocketed through the Trump Hotels, the Trump golf courses, or the other Trump enterprises in crypto coins and scams, and so on.

If you think self-reporting is working well under the foreign government Emoluments Clause, go ahead and vote for self-reporting under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. For me, I am sticking with the Fourth Amendment and the Constitution. Under our Constitution, it is judges, not FBI agents or government lawyers, who must protect our privacy and our civil liberties.

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Mr. RASKIN. Jayapal).

Mr. Speaker, the key point is this: Under this bill, FBI agents can still collect, search, and review Americans' communications without any review from a judge. It is the heart of the Fourth Amendment, Mr. Speaker, that search warrants have to be based upon probable cause, and you have to go to a judge to get a search warrant before you can invade the private expectations of the people in their places and in their things.

This bill leaves intelligence agencies in charge of policing their own compliance with the law. Asking Kash Patel to self-report his abuses to Tulsi Gabbard does nothing to protect the civil liberties of Americans.

That is not how our Constitution was designed. The whole reason we have the courts involved is to make sure that the executive branch doesn't get to be its own check and balance against itself.

Mr. Speaker, Kash Patel has been using government resources to chauffeur his girlfriend all over the country. Then when it was learned by the press that he was doing that, there was an article about it.

When he got mad about it, rather than say: Well, yeah, maybe there is a problem using an FBI SWAT team to shepherd my girlfriend around the country. Instead of changing the policy, he decided to go after the reporter and search the databases on the FBI.

This is while we are debating FISA.

If you need any more vivid demonstration, Mr. Speaker, of the danger of allowing law enforcement officials to govern themselves and to regulate whether or not they are violating the Constitution, check that out. We may disagree a lot about this FBI director's record. That is not directly relevant to this point.

Say you trust him, we don't, but we know you haven't trusted other people in the office before, Mr. Speaker. Let's legislate in a way that is consistent with the Constitution of the United States.

In closing, Mr. Speaker, the reason why we have to hold fast to the Constitution is precisely because we are all imperfect beings. I stood strongly for FISA 702 last time without the necessity of a search warrant because of all the reforms that I believed that the Biden administration would engage in, and they basically engaged in them.

Now the Trump administration is in, and President Trump came in and dismantled all of the safeguards we put in and just chased the watchdogs out of the FBI. That is why we must stick very closely to the Constitution, as my good friend, the chairman of the committee, argued the last time we debated this. He has convinced a lot of people that we need to stick to the Constitution. I am sorry we are not on the same side today.

The key point is that we do not trust government officials to regulate themselves. That is why law enforcement officers across the country, FBI, have to go to a judge to get a Fourth Amendment search warrant before they invade somebody's privacy unless there is exigency, unless there is an emergency, and we have accounted for that. We can deal with that problem.

Let's stick with the Constitution.

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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, yes, it is foreign intelligence, which is why when it comes to U.S. persons--U.S. citizens--the Fourth Amendment has to apply. The gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), my distinguished colleague, said that the legislation is bipartisan.

I tell you what else was bipartisan--in fact, unanimous: the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. Everybody got behind that. We are assured that there is reporting, but it is self-reporting. The distinguished ranking member says that it is by nonpolitical staff.

Yes, the nonpolitical staff left over after Kash Patel fired everybody at the FBI who they considered insufficiently loyal to MAGA and to Donald Trump and for those who worked on the January 6 case.

Then, we are told that the courts still can get involved at some point. Well, the courts are telling us right now that the FBI has been secretly breaking the law. Last month, the FISC court found that many of the government's 702 searches violated Federal law. We should be paying close attention to that as we move forward.

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