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 allow an amendment process because he knows reforms like requiring a warrant before the government searches Americans’ communications under Section 702 or closing the “data-broker loophole” — which allows agencies to purchase information they would otherwise need a warrant to obtain — have a good chance of passing the House.

When the House last debated the reauthorization of Section 702 in April 2024, the vote on an amendment for the warrant requirement failed on a tie vote. Although the amendment failed, a majority of the House Republican Conference voted for it.

And although Johnson wouldn’t allow an amendment to close the data broker loophole to be considered during the FISA debate, a separate vote on a bill to close it passed by a bipartisan majority. In fact, Johnson himself voted to close the data broker loophole in 2024, and the House unanimously adopted such a fix in 2023. There have been enough votes for privacy reform for at least two years, and the bipartisan pressure for reform has only ratcheted up since then.

Unfortunately, Johnson’s retreat on surveillance reform comes at the exact moment Americans should be demanding stronger protections, not weaker ones. Earlier this year, reports emerged of internal Pentagon debates over the use of artificial intelligence tools to collect and analyze Americans’ commercially available geolocation, browsing and other sensitive data.

AI doesn’t just collect information. It allows the government to analyze Americans’ movements, habits, associations and beliefs at a scale that would have been unimaginable when FISA first became law. This terrifying reality is a major reason why public support for reform is overwhelming.

Recent polling shows that only 12 percent of Americans want FISA extended without reforms. Seventy-six percent want Congress to close the backdoor search loophole. Eighty percent want the data-broker loophole closed. A coalition of 17 state attorneys general, led by New Mexico’s Raúl Torrez, has called on Congress to act. Montana closed its own version of the loophole unanimously in 2025.

And this pro-reform coalition transcends partisan politics. The two of us, one the leader of a progressive advocacy organization and the other a longtime conservative operative, learned this when we unexpectedly found ourselves fighting on the same side during the last FISA fight under the Biden administration. This is an issue that has Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) speaking the same language. Principled bipartisanship exists here.

That’s how we know that Johnson’s problem is not that privacy reform proposals lack support. The problem is that he knows they have enough to catalyze real congressional action.

That’s why he won’t allow amendment votes. Because if members of Congress were forced to go on record voting to require warrants for searches of Americans’ communications or to prevent the government from buying sensitive location data without judicial approval, there’s a very real chance those reforms would pass.

As long as Johnson keeps offering mere cosmetic tweaks to FISA, he’ll keep slamming into the same wall. The only way forward is to finally accept reality and address the core question of this debate: Should the government be allowed to search Americans’ communications and purchase their private data without a warrant?

Johnson already knows how the House would answer that question. That’s precisely why he refuses to let members vote on it, and why this fight for reform continues. That’s also why allowing these votes is the clearest path to the reauthorization he is demanding.

Sean Vitka is the executive director of Demand Progress. Jason Pye is the vice president of the Due Process Institute. 

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