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Reps. Davidson, Jayapal, and Three Dozen+ Allies Demand Critical Answers Regarding Unauthorized, Mass Domestic Surveillance
Is the administration conducting mass domestic surveillance without congress's authorization?
WASHINGTON
Yesterday, Representatives Warren Davidson (R-OH) and Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), joined by 37 of their colleagues, sent a bipartisan letter to Attorney General William Barr and Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe demanding answers to critical questions about possible mass surveillance of people in the United States. A full list of signers, which includes five committee chairs and a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, is appended. The letter is available here .
The Members asked the government to explain whether it is conducting mass domestic surveillance without congressional authorization. Specifically, they ask whether the administration is asserting that it has inherent executive authority, and thus doesn't need Congress's approval, for mass domestic surveillance, as well as whether it is occurring without congressional or judicial oversight. The Members set an October 6 deadline to receive a response. Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Mike Lee (R-UT) concluded such lawless surveillance would be illegal in a related letter in July.
The following statement can be attributed to Sean Vitka, senior policy counsel at Demand Progress:
"Representatives Davidson, Jayapal, and their allies have fought the Patriot Act back to the core rot eroding the people's right to privacy. This is a long fight and it is not over, but the trail now appears to lead back to rogue legal theories founded upon horrifyingly broad claims of inherent executive authority to conduct mass surveillance domestically. This intelligence surveillance would happen in the absence of the law, the courts, and even the suspicion of wrongdoing. This is how the government secretly started Stellarwind, the most stunningly illegal surveillance program in recent history.
What is at stake today is akin to when William Barr, during his first tenure as Attorney General, subjected millions of people in the United States to 21 years of phone records surveillance under the Drug Enforcement Administration, none of which saw the light of day until 2015. As far as we know, the DEA managed to stop any defense attorneys from challenging the obvious unconstitutionality of such surveillance by misleading prosecutors and the courts about where the records came from, euphemistically termed 'parallel construction.' Today, the DEA is flying planes over protesters.
If the government is blanketing the United States in warrantless surveillance, this is how they would -- and have -- done it.
Yet despite of the serious oversight the public deserves -- and has been demanding loudly for years -- we've instead seen the House and Senate Intelligence Committees protecting their turf and working to ensure that the rest of Congress has no say about what the intelligence agencies are doing domestically. While Richard Burr tries to signal Congressional acquiescence, Adam Schiff has been ensuring Congress can't vote on it at all.
We look forward to candid answers about how the government has interpreted the law and how far secret claims of inherent executive authority have embedded foreign intelligence surveillance into our daily lives. In the absence of those answers, Burr and Schiff's unwavering obstruction of real surveillance reform will further isolate them."
Context:
In March, then-Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Richard Burr (R-NC) claimed on the Senate floor that President Trump "can do all of this, without Congress's permission, with no guardrails" pursuant to Executive Order 12333. This was during debate over whether any members of Congress would have any chance to amend a Patriot Act reauthorization that itself provided for some domestic records surveillance.
In May, Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Adam Schiff (D-CA) vitiated a broadly supported protection against this unacknowledged use to allow for, in Senator Wyden's (D-OR) words, "dragnet collection of online activity" of Americans. Schiff accomplished this by cutting Dreamers and other immigrants out of the protection, pointing toward the alarming possibility that the government is presuming data in the United States does not belong to United States persons.
A number of other extraordinary actions by the Chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees stoke further concerns. Demand Progress led a letter dissecting these maneuvers in August, joined by Americans for Prosperity, Free Press Action, Fight for the Future, FreedomWorks, and others.
Demand Progress Education Fund and the FreedomWorks Foundation have released numerous materials regarding the expired authorities at www.section215.org, including the government's long history of abusing Section 215.
Demand Justice is a progressive movement fighting to restore the ideological balance and legitimacy of the federal courts by advocating for court reform and vigorously opposing extreme nominees.
A Republican congressman on Wednesday pushed back against President Donald Trump's push for war with Venezuela.
Speaking on the floor of the House of Representatives, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) demanded that Trump not take any military action against Venezuela without approval from the US Congress.
"The framers [of the US Constitution] understood a simple truth: To the extent that war-making powers devolves to one person, liberty dissolves," he said. "If the president believes that military action against Venezuela is justified and needed, he should make the case, and Congress should vote before American lives and treasure are spent on regime change in South America."
Massie then made clear that he wasn't simply making a procedural case against the president's actions, but a substantive case against going to war with Venezuela. In particular, the Kentucky congressman pointed to past US failures in regime-change wars such as Iraq and Libya to warn against making a similar case in South America.
"Previous presidents told us to go to war over WMDs that did not exist," he said, referring to weapons of mass destruction. "Now it's the same playbook. Except we're told that drugs are the WMDs. If it were about drugs, we'd bomb Mexico or China or Colombia."
Massie also argued that, if Trump were really concerned about the flow of illicit drugs into the US, he wouldn't have pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras who had been convicted in 2024 of conspiring to smuggle 400 tons of cocaine into the US.
"This is about oil and regime change," Massie said.
Massie: Previous presidents told us to go to war over WMDs that did not exist. Now it's the same playbook. Except we're told that drugs are the WMDs. If it were about drugs, we'd bomb Mexico or China or Colombia. And the president would not have pardoned Juan Orlando Hernandez.… pic.twitter.com/5h296rYnPJ — Acyn (@Acyn) December 17, 2025
Massie's points about the administration's rationale for war with Venezuela were echoed by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who also delivered a speech in the US House Wednesday denouncing the rush for military action.
"This is not about drugs, this is about regime change," she said. "And we also have the White House chief of staff [Susie Wiles] saying that this is about regime change. It has nothing to do with drugs."
Like Massie, Omar also emphasized the role for Congress set out by the US Constitution when it comes to declarations of war.
"Only Congress has the power to declare war," she said. "The Trump administration's military escalation in the Caribbean is not only reckless, it is blatantly illegal. We cannot allow this kind of dangerous overreach to go unchecked."
Trump's illegal military strikes in Venezuela aren't about drugs. They are about regime change.
But we must be clear - only Congress has the authority to declare war. Not the president.
Massie and Omar delivered their speeches during a debate over two resolutions aimed at limiting Trump's ability to wage war against Venezuela.
The first resolution demands Trump "remove United States armed forces from hostilities with any presidentially designated terrorist organization in the Western Hemisphere, unless authorized by a declaration of war or a specific congressional authorization for use of military force."
The second resolution more explicitly "directs the president to remove the use of United States armed forces from hostilities within or against Venezuela, unless explicitly authorized by a declaration of war or specific statutory authorization for use of military force."
Trump and his administration in recent weeks have been acting with increasing aggression against Venezuela, starting with the bombing of purported drug trafficking boats off the country's coast, and escalating earlier this month to seizing an oil tanker that had docked at one of its ports.
On Tuesday night, Trump announced a “total and complete blockade” of all “sanctioned oil tankers” seeking to enter and leave the country.
“Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. “It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before."
While talking with reporters on Wednesday, Trump upped the ante further and said that the US wanted to take Venezuela's oil supply.
"Getting land, oil rights, whatever we had—they took it away because we had a president that maybe wasn't watching," Trump said. "But they're not gonna do that. We want it back. They took our oil rights. We had a lot of oil there. They threw our companies out. And we want it back."
Sen. Ron Wyden said the bill "increases military spending by tens of billions of dollars and fails to include guardrails against Donald Trump and Hegseth’s authoritarian abuses."
A majority of Democratic senators joined Republicans on Wednesday to pass the largest military spending bill in US history, handing President Donald Trump the bulk of his demands, even as he enacts steep cuts across nearly every other sector of the federal budget.
The more than $900 billion National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) passed by a vote of 77-20, with 27 Democrats, as well as the independent Sen. Angus King (Maine), in support. Just three members of the Republican majority voted against the bill, along with 16 Democrats and independent Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.).
Among many other items on Trump's wish list, the bill provides funds for weapons meant to counter China, full funding for Trump's National Guard deployments to support the US immigration agents, and more funds for what are described as "counternarcotics operations."
It also removes a measure that would have restored collective bargaining rights that Trump stripped earlier this year from Pentagon employees, permanently ends Defense Department initiatives to curb climate change, and excludes a measure that would mandate healthcare coverage for in vitro fertilization.
Combined with $156 billion in the GOP's One Big Beautiful Bill Act this July, the package passed by the Senate pushesmilitary spending for fiscal year 2026 into the trillions—a new record in absolute terms and a relative level unseen since World War II.
The bill will head to Trump's desk just a day after he announced a “total and complete blockade" on Venezuelan oil tankers, a major escalation described by Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) as "unquestionably an act of war."
The bill contains a measure demanding that the Pentagon release the unedited video of a September 2 "double-tap" strike on a boat in the Caribbean that members of both parties have suggested may violate international law.
On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubiodeclined another congressional request to release the video. The defense bill ramps up the pressure for transparency, mandating a 25% cut to Hegseth's travel budget if the administration does not comply.
Senate Democrats have previously voted in support of war powers resolutions to require congressional approval for Trump's boat strikes and for further military action against Venezuela. These measures have repeatedly fallen just short in the Republican-controlled Senate.
But Stephen Semmler, a co-founder of the Security Policy Reform Institute, argued that "if the Senate truly cared about Trump seeking congressional approval before starting a war with Venezuela, it wouldn't have passed a bill authorizing $901 billion in military spending."
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who voted no on the defense spending bill, said, "I cannot support a bill that increases military spending by tens of billions of dollars and fails to include guardrails against Donald Trump and Hegseth’s authoritarian abuses."
“Donald Trump has repeatedly used the military to occupy major US cities, including Portland—endangering our service members, disrupting our economy, and eroding trust in our communities," Wyden continued. “He has also shown that he will use the Department of Defense to conduct deadly military operations without congressional authorization to intimidate political opponents and immigrants through the military, to purge senior military leaders without cause, to funnel billions of dollars in contracts to his personal supporters, and to waste billions of taxpayer dollars."
The defense spending bill passed the US House last week, with support from 115 Democrats. This was despite opposition from the Congressional Progressive Caucus, whose deputy chair, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), said it was "enabling unchecked executive war powers."
The House is expected to vote Wednesday evening on a pair of war powers resolutions. One, introduced by Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), would block Trump's extrajudicial airstrikes on boats in the Caribbean. Another bipartisan resolution would require Trump to receive congressional approval before taking direct military action, including land strikes, against Venezuela.
"After 20 years of continuous reporting, the Report Card stands as a chronicle of change and a caution for what the future will bring," report contributors said.
The Arctic just experienced its warmest air temperatures on record between October 2024 and September 2025 as the climate crisis dramatically alters the region, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found in its 20th Arctic Report Card.
The annual report, released Tuesday, also notes the Arctic's lowest maximum sea-ice extent and its wettest year on record. The past 10 years have been the warmest recorded in a region that is heating at two to four times the global average.
"After 20 years of continuous reporting, the Report Card stands as a chronicle of change and a caution for what the future will bring," report editors Matthew Langdon Druckenmiller, Rick Thoman, and Twila A. Moon wrote in the executive summary. "Transformations over the next 20 years will reshape Arctic environments and ecosystems, impact the well-being of Arctic residents, and influence the trajectory of the global climate system itself, which we all depend on."
Arctic warming is not confined to the spring and summer months, but marks a full-year transformation, with fall 2024 being the warmest Arctic fall on record and winter 2025 the second-warmest winter. While snow levels do remain high in the winter months, they consistently drop by June, with snow cover during that month now about half of 1960s levels. Precipitation in the winter months is also not limited to snow.
"We can point to the Arctic as a far away place but the changes there affect the rest of the world.”
At sea, ice extent is also shrinking in the winter, with March 2025 seeing the lowest maximum sea-ice extent in nearly 50 years of satellite data. The oldest, thickest ice has shrunk by over 95% since the 1980s, and its domain has constricted to areas north of Greenland and the Canadian archipelago.
“There’s been a steady decline in sea ice and unfortunately we are seeing rain now even in winter,” Druckenmiller told the Guardian. “We are seeing changes in the heart of winter, when we expect the Arctic to be cold. The whole concept of winter is being redefined in the Arctic.”
Warming temperatures are also driving changes in ecosystems, with more southern species and conditions shifting northward both on land and at sea. On land, this happens via the "greening" of the tundra and the spread of boreal species into the Arctic. At sea, warmer, saltier water is shifting north, driving the "Atlantification" of the Arctic, which exacerbates ice melt and threatens to destabilize ocean circulation patterns.
Changes are also occurring on the Pacific side of the Arctic Ocean, with Arctic species declining by two-thirds in the northern Bering Sea and one-half in the Chukchi Sea.
“We are no longer just documenting warming—we are witnessing an entire marine ecosystem transform within a single generation,” Hannah-Marie Ladd, director of the Indigenous Sentinels Network on the Aleut community of Saint Paul Island, said at a conference unveiling the report.
Ocean warming, the melting of glaciers, and melting permafrost are increasing weather hazards and other dangers for Arctic communities. For example, warm ocean temperatures fueled ex-Typhoon Halong in October 2025, which forced over 1,500 people to evacuate from Alaska's southwestern coast and nearly destroyed two villages.
Glacier melt has increased the risk of sudden flooding and landslides, while the melting of permafrost is leading to the phenomenon of "rusting rivers," as oxidized iron from melting permafrost enters the water and degrades water quality.
These impacts aren't limited to the Arctic. The Greenland ice sheet, for example, lost 129 billion tons of sea ice, which contributes to global sea-level rise.
“We are seeing cascading impacts from a warming Arctic,” Climate Central scientist Zack Labe told the Guardian. “Coastal cities aren’t ready for the rising sea levels, we have completely changed the fisheries in the Arctic, which leads to rising food bills for seafood. We can point to the Arctic as a far away place but the changes there affect the rest of the world.”
Outside researchers noted that the administration did not seem to have significantly altered the content of the 2025 Arctic Report Card.
“I honestly did not see much of a tone shift in comparison to previous Arctic report cards in years past, which was great to see,” Climate Centralmedia director Tom Di Liberto toldNBC News. “The implications of their findings are the same as past Arctic report cards. The Arctic is the canary in the coal mine.”
"The Trump administration’s cuts to budgets, staffing, and resources for science are already affecting data and research related to the Arctic."
Druckenmiller also told reporters that the team “did not receive any political interference with our results.”
However, the 2024 Arctic Report Cardurged a "global reductions of fossil fuel pollution," in its subhead, an exhortation missing from the 2025 version.
The 2025 report did refer to the impacts of federal funding cuts, discussing "vulnerabilities and risks facing nationally and internationally coordinated observing programs, especially amid risks of diminishing US investments in climate and environmental observations," as Druckenmiller, Thoman, and Moon wrote.
"The Trump administration’s cuts to budgets, staffing, and resources for science are already affecting data and research related to the Arctic," the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) posted on social media in response to the release.
However, even if the report did not highlight the causes of the climate emergency, it's ultimate message was unmistakable, UCS said: "It’s clear that fossil fueled climate change is having an alarming effect on the vital signs of this unique, crucial region of the world."
