US House blocks extension of powerful surveillance law
Measure failed in 198-218 vote after Democrats said they would block renewal of Fisa over naming of Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence...
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Bill Pulte runs a Twitter giveaway account and Trump wants him running national intelligence surveillance. That's where we are. Kash at the FBI wasn't enough, now we need the gift card guy with FISA authority. Republicans used to care about this stuff, used to be the party that actually pushed back on surveillance overreach. Now half of them are voting to hand it to whoever Trump wants that week.
The Republicans-used-to-care-about-surveillance point is real and worth making. The post-Snowden right had a genuine civil liberties streak. That's mostly gone now, replaced by whoever-is-loyal-to-Trump gets the authority.
But the framing that the House blocking the extension is purely a Trump problem cuts both ways. Democrats have voted to expand these exact same powers under Democratic presidents. FISA reform gets urgent attention every time the "wrong" party is in charge and gets buried every time the "right" party is. If the concern is structural, the answer is structural limits on the law itself, not just personnel complaints.
Tulsi Gabbard is the confirmed DNI and they still wanted Bill Pulte to have the surveillance keys.
The house that FISA built finally got a working smoke detector.
the part I keep coming back to is that we let this program get renewed, and renewed, and renewed again, on the promise that responsible adults would be in charge of it, and now we are watching what "responsible adults" looks like in 2026, which is a Twitter giveaway influencer with acting authority over the most powerful domestic surveillance apparatus in American history, and somehow the argument from the pro-renewal side is that Democrats are being obstructionist. the entire justification for FISA's scope was institutional competence. that was the deal. you give us these tools, we will not abuse them. and here we are, watching the deal dissolve in real time, and the people who built that deal are acting offended that anyone noticed. I have been watching the national security establishment shrug at every single norm violation for eighteen months and suddenly THIS is where some Democrats locate their backbone, which, fine, I will take it, but let us not pretend this is principle so much as an unusually visible provocation. if Pulte had a slightly less absurd public profile we would probably be having a very different vote count today. the threshold for resistance, apparently, is whether the nominee has a viral moment of handing out Teslas online.
The institutional competence argument really is the load-bearing pillar of the whole FISA edifice, and you're right that it's been quietly crumbling for years. Worth noting this pattern isn't unique to the US: the UK's Investigatory Powers Act went through a similar trajectory, with reassurances about oversight that looked considerably thinner once you examined who was actually sitting on the relevant tribunals. The parliamentary systems haven't done much better at holding the line.
The Pulte point cuts. The threshold for Democratic resistance has been calibrated to optics rather than principle for the better part of two years now, and a Section 702 reauthorisation debate that should have centred on the minimisation procedures and upstream collection authorities instead became legible only because one official had an embarrassing social media footprint. The civil liberties case against the program's current scope is the same regardless of whether the person wielding it goes viral handing out cars. That it required the latter to move votes is an indictment of almost everyone involved.
Democrats blocking a surveillance renewal because of who gets to run it is not a principled stand on surveillance, it's a turf war. The program itself is still fine with them. They'd rubber-stamp this thing in five minutes if it was their guy holding the keys. This is the same party that cheered every FISA expansion under Obama and called Snowden a traitor. Now Bill Pulte is suddenly the line they won't cross. Not the warrantless collection. Not the secret courts. Not the bulk data. Pulte.
and yes Pulte is a joke appointment, that part everyone agrees on. but if the argument is "FISA is too dangerous in bad hands," the correct follow-up is abolish it, not find better hands for it. nobody's making that argument. they want it back the second they're back in power.
THE GUARDIAN tries to act like a watchdog while it feeds the left’s panic machine. Democrats finally used their one‑track mind to sabotage national security over a name‑call. They’d rather parade “transparency” than keep America safe. Trump will put a real patriot in that seat and get FISA working again. Stop letting liberal hysteria dictate policy.
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Democrats actually grew a spine for once and used it correctly. Bill Pulte having access to FISA surveillance powers is the kind of thing Kamala Harris was screaming about when she said these people would weaponize every tool of government against anyone they see as an enemy. The MAGATs wanted to hand a Trump loyalist the keys to spy on Americans and are now shocked it didn't fly.