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Congressional Quarterly's Tim Starks:
Democrats on Wednesday will move a bill through the House governing electronic surveillance, without allowing individual lawmakers the chance to try to alter it.
As the House was preparing Tuesday for floor debate, the Senate Intelligence Committee received access to long-sought legal documents related to the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program, according to the chairman of the panel. House leaders were still awaiting the documents.
The House legislation (HR 3773) is likely to gain the support of most Democrats and even a handful of Republicans when it comes to a floor vote, but the White House threatened a veto Tuesday.
The only changes to the bill will come as a result of the House Judiciary and Intelligence panels combining their two, slightly different versions of the legislation and an amendment incorporated into the rule for floor debate that would allow a court to issue temporary surveillance orders when an application is under appeal. It also would require any administration demand for assistance from telecommunications companies to cite the section of law with which it is in compliance.
Among the amendments blocked Tuesday by the House Rules Committee when it approved a closed rule, 8-4, was one supported by House liberals that would have required individual warrants for communications where one party is a U.S. citizen. Another major amendment, backed by Republicans, would have offered retroactive legal immunity to companies that participated in the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program.
The Democrats’ decision to prohibit amendments on the House floor drew harsh words from Republicans during a Rules Committee debate. The minority Republicans called the decision “arrogant,” “sad,” “outrageous” and more. ...
The new bill, which would amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA, PL 95-511), would allow the director of national intelligence and the attorney general to apply to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for an order authorizing up to one year of surveillance of people reasonably believed to be located outside the United States. The officials also could apply for one-year extensions of such orders. Any one order could encompass a large number of targets.
The director and attorney general would have to certify that the surveillance targets were not “U.S. persons” and that a significant purpose of the surveillance was to obtain foreign intelligence information.
Any surveillance authorized under the legislation before its Dec. 31, 2009, expiration date would be permitted to continue for as long as it had been authorized.
The merged text of the Intelligence and Judiciary bills would retain all the major amendments adopted by both panels.
That means it would reaffirm that FISA is the only basis for conducting domestic surveillance and require the administration to “fully inform” Congress of any surveillance programs put into place since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. It would increase the number of FISA court judges and personnel handling FISA warrants and mandate that the court examine and approve how guidelines are applied for surveillance targeting.
Additionally, it would require a federal judge to review government compliance with the terms of the surveillance orders and require the government to inform lawmakers of the “primary purpose” of the foreign surveillance authorized by FISA court orders.
Democrats contend their bill gives proper attention to both security and civil liberties. ...
Across the Capitol, Senate Intelligence Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV, D W.Va., said his staff Tuesday reviewed legal opinions and other documents the panel had sought related to the NSA program. He said his staff was allowed to take notes, but he hadn’t been briefed on their contents yet and intended to view them for himself.
Although Rockefeller’s panel had been tentatively scheduled to mark up its own FISA legislation Thursday, “There wasn’t going to be a markup unless we got that stuff,” he said.
The Senate Judiciary Committee had issued a subpoena this summer for the documents, but Rockefeller said he did not know if that panel would receive access to them. House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers, Jr., D-Mich., in a letter to White House counsel Fred Fielding, complained that the documents were being provided to Senate Intelligence, but not to his panel or the House Intellligence Committee.
...The House bill has left out retroactive legal immunity. Several developments have given Democrats ammunition in their effort to withhold it. ...