Thune bucks Trump on tying voter ID law to renewal of FISA spy bill: 'Not realistic'
Source: The Independent
Monday 15 June 2026 18:59 EDT
The Senate’s push to renew a critical piece of surveillance legislation hit another snag Monday as Donald Trump sought to link its passage to the Save America Act, the controversial voter ID bill he’s been pushing.
But Senate Majority Leader John Thune signaled that his caucus would simply ignore the president’s apparent veto threat, the latest evidence of a gulf between the president and the Senate GOP and a sign of how tired many Republican senators are of the president’s interference in the upper chamber’s affairs.
In a Truth Social post on Monday morning, Trump wrote that he would not sign an extension of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)’s Section 702 without the voter ID legislation attached to the bill. FISA Section 702 gives the intelligence community the authority to collect electronic records of persons acting on foreign soil, and it expired on Friday amid a dispute between Democrats and the White House over the nomination of a MAGA operative to be Trump’s next acting director of national intelligence. “I’m against FISA if it doesn’t come with The Save America Act (Full version!) firmly attached to it,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Thune gaggled with reporters on the Hill on Monday afternoon and responded by flatly rejecting that notion: “I think the president wants to add Save America to pretty much everything, but that you know, obviously, is not realistic to get the FISA bill done, and we want to get the FISA bill done.”
Read more: https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-fisa-thune-senate-republicans-b2996223.html