Thread by @BasedMikeLee

🧵Just a few weeks ago, the House was ready to pass legislation prohibiting warrantless searches of Americans’ private communications under FISA 702.

A few House Republicans then created a fake “national security” distraction and convinced the House to adjourn.

Shameful.

https://twitter.com/repthomasmassie/status/1776938078831018427

Weeks later, the House appears ready to reauthorize FISA 702 — which has been abused literally hundreds of thousands of times to spy on Americans without a warrant — without requiring the government to get a warrant.

The government has lied, obfuscated, cheated, and manipulated FISA 702, depriving Americans of one of our core constitutional protections.

I call upon @SpeakerJohnson and every member of the House of Representatives to end this madness, and stop this cycle of abuse carried out by the deep state against the American people.

The warrant requirement is important, but other reforms are needed too. For example, the package of reforms presented in the “Lee-Leahy” proposal (which passed the Senate with 77 votes in 2020) would bring much-needed transparency to FISA, the absence of which has enabled abuse.

There are bipartisan reform bills in both houses of Congress that would correct the problem, including a bill I’ve introduced with @DickDurbin called the SAFE Act.

The SAFE Act contains a warrant requirement, the Lee-Leahy reforms, language ensuring that our Fourth Amendment rights can’t be bought and sold, and a handful of other protections necessary to protect Americans’s privacy. You can read about that bill here: lee.senate.gov/2024/3/lee-dur…

The House Judiciary Committee has produced a comparable bill that would likewise fix the problem, but @SpeakerJohnson has declined to bring that bill to the floor, opting instead to have members vote on a “compromise” measure—one that would compromise the rights of Americans if passed without amendments.

@SpeakerJohnson has indicated that he’ll allow the House to vote on a few amendments. I strongly encourage him and every House member to support the amendment requiring a warrant to protect Americans from warrantless surveillance under FISA 702.

I also strongly encourage @SpeakerJohnson to allow for a vote on, and advocate for passage of, an amendment containing the Lee-Leahy measures to provide much-needed transparency to the FISA process.

If these reforms are not adopted, I strongly encourage every member of the House to oppose the reauthorization of FISA 702 this week.

Please like and share if you agree, and implore your representatives to protect your Fourth Amendment rights, which the FISA 702 bill coming before the House this week would, if enacted without significant changes, leave dangerously undermined.