In the hours between midnight and dawn, when a procedural vote is failing, members are being removed from the cloak rooms, calls are coming in from all directions, and no one is completely certain what the final count will be, a certain kind of chaos descends on Capitol Hill. That’s where Republican leadership found itself on the evening of April 17, attempting and failing twice to pass an 18-month extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a surveillance authority that some libertarian-minded House Republicans view as a tool for warrantless surveillance of Americans and that the Trump administration views as essential to ongoing military operations. The clean extension had expired by early Friday morning. The best anyone could manage was a 10-day emergency patch.

Almost immediately, fingerprinting began, and it was not done in an outward direction. Republicans in the House pointed at the White House, many of them speaking anonymously. The White House retaliated against the holdouts. Both were targeted by the holdouts. “This is why we shouldn’t wait until the last minute on these things,” a Republican member of the House told Politico. A more direct statement was made by a congressional aide: “The White House was too late to make a decision. The original sin was that. Hearing this remark from a member of the president’s own party is startling, and it sums up the mood that had been developing for weeks.

Trump had been clear about his intentions. On social media, he urged Republicans to “UNIFY” behind Speaker Mike Johnson in support of a clean, no-reforms extension. He placed calls. To present the national security case, his administration sent Joint Chiefs Chairman General Dan Caine, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and Deputy CIA Director Michael Ellis, who personally called each member. Throughout the night, White House legislative affairs employees worked the phones, tallied votes, and engaged in negotiations. Nevertheless, the numbers were missing when the votes were called.

Unify. Or Else. How Trump’s FISA Demand Became the Rare Fight His Own Party Refused to Settle

The holdouts’ main complaint is neither novel nor trivial. FISA was amended in 2008 to include Section 702, which permits the NSA to obtain communications from foreign nationals residing outside of the US without a warrant. The issue, as detractors on both sides of the debate have long maintained, is that in reality, this collects vast volumes of American communications, including emails, phone conversations, and text messages, without requiring a warrant. Although intelligence services dispute the ACLU’s description of it as “mass, warrantless surveillance,” the fundamental process is essentially correct. One of the most outspoken Republican opponents of a clean extension, Texas Representative Chip Roy, had been warning for weeks that it would not pass. He said, “A clean extension ain’t going to move on the floor,” and he was correct.

The history of the White House’s stance on all of this is fascinating. During his campaigns in 2016 and 2020, Trump claimed for years that he was “a victim of the worst and most illegal abuse of Fisa” in American history. His demand for a clean, no-reforms extension was especially striking because of this history, and some of his fellow House skeptics were less likely to believe him when he said the program should be extended exactly as it is. Some of these members seem to feel that the argument to “trust the intelligence agencies” is much less persuasive after being informed for years that the agencies are unreliable.

A number of factors that indicate the failure was more about procedure than principle ultimately drove the entire situation past its breaking point. In early February, Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, who would have traditionally been one of the program’s main proponents and whose office has a statutory role in overseeing Section 702, privately voiced concerns to Trump about expanding the program without adding privacy protections. That created a void in the coordinated message and deviated from the administration’s official stance. Around the same time, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee met with administration representatives and directly questioned them about the White House’s stance on extending the law, but they refused to provide a definitive response. Republicans and Democrats on the panel, who are generally in favor of the program and wanted to plan around a stable administration position, were both irritated by the ambiguity.

Here, the Democrats are a problem in and of themselves. A narrowly divided House will need Democratic votes to approve any final FISA extension, and Johnson did little to win them over. “They never came to us,” a Democratic assistant said to Politico. Johnson was informed directly by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries that Democrats had been publicly voicing “great Democratic skepticism” regarding a clean extension for months. It was always going to be necessary for everyone to stay in line in order to build a majority based solely on Republican votes, and a clean extension that ignores warrant requirements was never going to garner widespread Democratic support. Hardliners didn’t.

Only time is purchased by the 10-day extension. April 30 is the next deadline. In the interim, Republican leadership will need to figure out how many Democrats they need and what it will take to win them. They will also need to come up with a set of reforms that will satisfy enough of the holdouts without alienating the moderates who want the program to remain in place. According to reports, Jim Jordan has been informing some Republicans in private that a clean extension now could result in warrant reforms later.

This promise has drawn criticism from members who have heard similar promises in the past. Depending on who is making it, who is listening, and whether a deal can be reached before the next deadline, that case may or may not hold.