Johnson Is In An Impossible Position On FISA Renewal, But He Didn’t Help Himself Yesterday

April 11th, 2024 MacAoidh

If we had to bet, we’d say that next week the House of Representatives will vote to renew the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and thus avert what the Washington establishment is saying would create a national security crisis. FISA enables law enforcement and intelligence agencies to wiretap and otherwise surveil the communications by foreign villains.

But yesterday, 19 Republicans joined with most Democrats to oppose the renewal of FISA, which was yet another defeat for House Speaker Mike Johnson. And official Washington is in a panic over the inability to pass the FISA renewal.

Why can’t Johnson get a majority to renew something that has been held forth as a vital tool for developing proper intelligence on foreign threats to our interests?

That’s a complicated question.

One simple answer is it’s damned difficult for Johnson to get a majority for virtually anything. He has such a razor-thin margin with Republicans holding only 218 House seats to the Democrats’ 212 that he’s got to either deliver unanimous GOP support for something or he has to reach across the aisle – and doing that is almost guaranteed to run off more Republican support than it adds from Democrats.

A Speaker’s job is to make a majority, particularly on “must-pass” bills like the federal appropriations instruments. Arguably, the FISA renewal is such a bill.

Johnson has members of his caucus who are either RINOs or who represent swing districts. It’s hard to get them to come aboard for strong conservative reforms, for a couple of reasions: first, any such reforms are dead on arrival in the Democrat-dominated Senate, not to mention they’d be vetoed by Joe Biden if they made it that far. For those congressmen, there’s nothing but downside to voting for those reforms: they aren’t going to be making policy, so they’re not actually changing anything, plus they’re now going to get attacked by Democrat special interest groups for having backed those reforms.

In a House majority with 240 members, let’s say, Johnson could simply excuse a few of those members to vote with the Democrats because he could bleed some votes and still pass the bill. He doesn’t have that freedom now.

This means that Mike Johnson isn’t in the business of passing conservative legislation. He’s reduced to trying to pass moderate legislation because it’s a better alternative than passing leftist legislation – or passing nothing and getting trashed for grinding the House of Representatives down into dysfunction.

Most conservatives would be perfectly happy to see the latter – including the grand spectacle of a government shutdown. The problem is, we’re not in the majority with such an opinion. Generally, voters think government shutdowns are a sign of incompetent governance and they generate negative political results.

Which Johnson can’t afford, because virtually any sort of Democrat success in November will make Hakeem Jeffries the House Speaker. And as it stands, Marjorie Taylor Greene has a motion to vacate the chair hanging over Johnson’s head on the right, so he could lose his speakership in one of two ways.

He has no room to move.

But in such a circumstance, there is a principled path to follow, and so far Johnson hasn’t followed it.

Namely, that the Biden administration wants to renew FISA without a requirement that warrants be obtained.

The government has abused FISA too much. The Trump-Russia debacle, which was weaponized to hamstring a duly-elected president for two crucial years of his presidency – which coincided with Republican control over both the House and Senate, which was lost in the 2018 midterms largely because of the fake Trump-Russia scandal – has to carry consequences.

We can’t trust the CIA, FBI and other Deep State agencies not to abuse their power if there aren’t guardrails. The requirement that they obtain warrants before surveilling FISA suspects might seem onerous to them, but that’s too bad.

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The 19 Republicans who refused to renew FISA did so because the bill as brought to the floor for a procedural vote lacked a warrant requirement.

We recognize Johnson’s trouble here. He has to make a majority for FISA renewal, and he has to find a way to that majority.

Unless there is no such majority to be had, in which case FISA expires and the risk increases that some terrorist attack or similar act of war is perpetrated upon the American people and the after-effect would be the prospect that it could have been averted but for Mike Johnson’s failure to pass a FISA renewal.

But we already know that the federal government has abused FISA some 278,000 times, including spying on 19,000 donors to a congressional candidate the FBI didn’t like.

And people connected to a presidential candidate the FBI didn’t like. For what turned out to be no valid reason.

This would make a rogue federal law enforcement and intelligence community a larger threat to American constitutional norms and civil liberties than any foreign villains.

We suspect that a majority to renew FISA would depend on a warrant requirement for FISA surveillance, particularly when American citizens are involved. It’s a bit disappointing that Johnson would have brought that bill without such a requirement.

But he’ll have to bring it now. He isn’t getting those 19 Republicans without it.

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