Extension of Authorities of Title VII of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978

Floor Speech

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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I do not oppose the motion.

The Senate just unanimously passed this 43-day extension. Yesterday I was struck by a point my colleagues from the House Intelligence Committee made here on the House floor that the FISA 702 authorities were too important to turn off. We agree. But I also know that we cannot turn off our constitutional values and principles.

Nothing about protecting our safety should prevent us from protecting our rights. We can have both. When we talk about protecting civil liberties, we are not speaking of theoretical threats. We are talking of real violations perpetrated by the FBI, not just in 2022, but over the past year and still going on today.

The March 2026 FISC opinion describing the FISC judge's concerns about the FBI's violations of FISA is still classified by an administration that seems intent on keeping the public in the dark as we debate this fundamental problem.

We can say with some confidence that the FBI has no idea how many U.S. person queries they ran last year, how many times they spied on American citizens. We should not have to take this vote without being able to explain these serious deficiencies. We have a right to know how many times the communications of American citizens were accessed.

Every day that goes by where the Trump administration and Kash Patel's FBI can circumvent our constitutional values to spy on American citizens is one day too many. I won't oppose this short extension but only because it is my fervent hope and determination that it will give us the time to work together across the aisle to implement meaningful reform.

It is long past time for Speaker Johnson to stop blocking Members of this body from coming together across party lines to work in good faith to strike a bipartisan deal on section 702 that is the support of a robust, bipartisan majority which believes that the program is important for foreign intelligence but must be made consistent with the essential constitutional values of our privacy rights under the Constitution.

A significant majority of Members in this Chamber, Democrats and Republicans alike, want real reforms to protect Americans' privacy and civil liberties, not the paltry restatements of current law that have been offered to us so far.

The vast majority of Members of this body and the American people want a Federal judge, not an FBI agent or an FBI lawyer, to stand between them and their private communications. That is the constitutional design. You go to a judge. You don't leave it to the executive branch itself to check its own behavior.

The Speaker must allow the House to work its will. The Speaker must allow the House to serve the American people, to bring to the floor legislation that lives up to the spirit of the Fourth Amendment and ensures Americans are protected from their government as the Founders intended.

So as a gesture of good faith, we will give a few-week extension here, but we would love the Speaker of the House to get serious and allow us to have meaningful, bipartisan negotiation and compromise.

I have heard from so many distinguished Republican Members over there, including a number of former Federal prosecutors, who say: We can work this thing out. Let us do the people's business, and let's work it out.

I thank my friend from Kentucky for his always unswerving leadership on behalf of constitutional values, privacy, and the civil rights and civil liberties of the people.

The question here is how are we actually going to move the Speaker, who seems to be immersed in some combination of inertia, bureaucracy, and chaos, and the Senate, which doesn't seem to be living up to its traditional role in trying to reconcile our foreign policy and national security agenda with the constitutional values of the people?

We are saying, let's give it a few weeks now. I hope that Chairman Jordan will echo my endorsement of us really getting together to have bipartisan negotiations and compromise on this. This is not a partisan problem. We have people on all sides of this on both sides of the aisle. The vast majority of the Democrats want to make sure that we have a program that protects the privacy rights and the civil liberties of the people.

No, we do not trust Kash Patel to have conversations with Tulsi Gabbard as a successful substitute for the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. I am sure you don't trust whoever you would liken to Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard on our side.

That is fine. That is partisan politics. That is why we want this to rest on some level of constitutional principles that will cut across party lines.

Let's take a few weeks to have serious, meaningful discussion. As a gesture of good faith, we say we will work with the Speaker if the Speaker will work with us.

We see him conducting negotiations in the middle of votes on the House floor. How about we all get together the way that Congress is supposed to and have meaningful discussion and dialogue? Let's do the same thing with people in the Senate.

I challenge the Members of the Senate to stand up for a system that the American people can believe in. We simply cannot leave it up to Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard and Donald Trump to enforce our civil rights and civil liberties for us. That is not going to work. They are partisan actors. They have proven themselves to be partisan actors, and they don't make any bones about that. They are unashamed of it. That is fine. Then we need to put principles in place that are going to protect the American people.

The critical point is that we need to have a judge standing between the FBI and the private communications of the American people. This has got to be the essential constitutional value that is vindicated here. We need to interpose the authority and the independence of a judge between the FBI and the communications of the people.

The reform that my friend from Texas just mentioned is to have Kash Patel report his abuses to Tulsi Gabbard. If you think that is a good substitute for the Fourth Amendment, well, then you can go with what the gentleman was talking about, which was this 3-year extension. We are not willing go with the 3-year extension. 191 of us voted against it, including a dozen Republicans.

We are willing to give you 40 more days or 45 more days for us to negotiate this thing, if the Speaker will actually sit down with us. We want the Speaker to sit down with us, and we want the Senate to take its constitutional responsibilities seriously here.

The privacy rights of the people are too essential, and the privacy rights of the people should not be pitted against the national security interests of the country.

We can make this happen if we are willing to get rid of all of the chaos and the pandemonium that we have seen over the last several days and simply sit down and have a meaningful conversation and write the legislation.

Mr. Speaker, we can reconcile the essential constitutional values of the country with the national security of the country. This 45-day continuation is a mandate. It is a mandate to the Speaker to allow the House to finally come together to develop compromise legislation that guarantees that judges--not Kash Patel, not Tulsi Gabbard, and not Donald Trump--will be the ones to ensure our privacy and our civil liberties.

Let's use this period to engage in real legislative compromise and negotiation in the interests of the American people.

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