Vote in House today on temporary extension appears doomed as Trump and Dems face off over appointment of Bill Pulte as national intel director.
I posted late yesterday about how President Trump and Republican leaders in Congress were trying to entice the Democratic minorities in both chambers to agree to a temporary extension of the government’s statutory foreign intelligence collection authority — FISA Section 702. An important vote is scheduled to happen in the House today and appears doomed to fail.
Section 702 will expire at midnight on Friday if not extended. In principle, there is majority bipartisan support to extend the provision for three years, and the president supports such a deal. Yet, there are still details to be worked out — mainly, additional limitations on the government’s use of the Section 702 database, where collected communications data are stored, to investigate Americans. That’s a complicated subject and the dispute has narrowed, so I will address it in a separate post.
For now, the issue is that the president scuttled the bipartisan consensus by naming Bill Pulte, his Federal Housing Finance Agency director, to become acting Director of National Intelligence when Tulsi Gabbard, the current, Senate-confirmed DNI steps down next Friday (June 19).
Democrats and a smattering of Republicans (more than are willing to speak on the matter publicly) are virulently opposed to Pulte’s appointment. He has no intelligence experience, although “extensive expertise” in the subject is a statutory qualification for the post. More to the point, he is a Trump loyalist at the cutting edge of lawfare, who has used his access to government mortgage files at FHFA to try to develop bank fraud cases against Trump’s political enemies — mostly Democrats, such as New York Attorney General Letitia James, Senator Adam Schiff of California, and Biden-appointed Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook.
Trump being Trump, he has refused to back down on the Pulte appointment. He has tried, however, to minimize its impact (as I detailed in yesterday’s post) by promising to nominate a “permanent” DNI (i.e., one who would, he expects, be confirmed by the Senate, rather than serve in an acting capacity). The name of Pete Hoekstra is being floated. He is clearly qualified and confirmable. A prominent Michigan Republican who is currently Trump’s ambassador to Canada, Hoekstra was Trump’s first-term ambassador to the Netherlands; more importantly for present purposes, he chaired the Intelligence Committee during his 18-year stint in the House and has deep national security experience.
The president’s suggestion is that Pulte’s tenure as acting DNI will be short and limited. Trump has indicated that he wants Pulte to concentrate on reducing bureaucratic bloat at ODNI (the office of the DNI), not intelligence operations. Plus, Pulte will only be a part-timer because he is remaining as FHFA director.
This is not satisfactory to Pulte’s congressional detractors, especially those who see the ODNI as critical to the U.S. foreign intelligence mission. (I see it as a redundant politicized waste that should never have been established and should be repealed, but that’s a discussion for another day.) Politically, Democrats want Trump to concede that Pulte’s appointment was a blunder and retract it. The midterms are just a few months away and the president’s ratings continue to crater: Fox News now reports him polling at an all-time low 33 percent approval.
The problem for the president and Republican congressional leaders is that they need Democratic votes for even a temporary, short extension of Section 702. What’s under discussion would extend it for about a month.
To schedule the vote today, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) has relied on a provision that allows expedited consideration of legislation. The catch is passage requires a two-thirds’ supermajority. It is highly unlikely that the votes will be there — certainly not if Trump sticks to his guns on Pulte.
The near certainty that Democrats will not back the temporary extension is elucidated by their public position that the nation will not be vulnerable if surveillance authority lapses on Friday. As the matter was put by Representative Jamie Raskin (D., Md.), the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee, “Government surveillance activities will continue unchanged” even if Section 702 expires.
This is mostly right, for the reasons I explained yesterday:
Even if the statute is allowed to expire on Friday, intelligence collection programs operating under existing court orders would be allowed to continue until those court orders lapse. The duration of those orders is generally a year; they are not on the same calendar schedule as the statutory authorization.
Raskin is potentially wrong, though, on at least two grounds. First, while current court-authorized collection authority can continue, there is some legal doubt about the continuing authority of government intelligence agents to query the database. They probably can, but that may require a ruling by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which could slow things up for a time. Second, to the extent our intelligence collection programs rely on the cooperation of private telecommunications companies, those companies could be concerned about legal liability if the statutory authority has lapsed, even if the court authorization ostensibly allows them to continue working with the government.
In any event, it’s a sign of the times. Trump knows that installing Pulte was a mistake, but he can’t bring himself to retreat so he’s taking the position that Pulte’s appointment is just a temporary measure that won’t do any real harm. And Democrats know that it’s a mistake to allow Section 702 to lapse just so they can score political points over the asinine Pulte appointment, so they’re saying we shouldn’t worry because Section 702 is not really lapsing.
Meantime, each side will accuse the other of pushing the nation to the brink of catastrophic intelligence failure. Welcome to today’s Washington.