The Los Angeles Post

House requests conference with Senate after FISA vote canceled

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The House voted Thursday to request a conference with the Senate over a bill to reauthorize three intelligence programs after it failed twice this week to vote on the legislation.

The 282-122 vote allows negotiations between the House and Senate to begin as Congress tries to reach a deal on legislation to reauthorize three lapsed surveillance programs and make some changes to the court associated with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the top members of the House Intelligence Committee; Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the top members of the Judiciary Committee; and Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), who has been at the center of the months-long debate, will lead the negotiations for the House.

The Senate will also have to vote to formally launch a conference committee. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) talked on Thursday morning about the plan to go to conference to work out the differences.

“The Leaders spoke this morning. Going to a conference committee is regular order when the two chambers disagree,” a spokesman for McConnell told The Hill.

Establishing a conference committee would allow leadership and key members space to try to hash out an agreement on how to handle the intelligence programs in the face of insurmountable opposition from Republicans and progressives that scuttled Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) plan to try to send a Senate-passed bill to President Trump’s desk.

“It will be our intention to go to conference in order to ensure that all of the views of all Members of our Caucus are represented in the final product,” Pelosi wrote in a “Dear Colleague” letter on Thursday, laying out her backup plan.

Democratic leadership has largely pinned the failure to secure passage of the reauthorization bill on Trump, who on Tuesday urged Republican lawmakers to vote against it over his allegations of abuse of FISA by the Obama administration to spy on his 2016 campaign.