On April 12, 2024, the House voted on a simple question: should the FBI have to get a warrant before it goes into a government database and reads an American's emails, texts and calls?

The measure was Amendment No. 1 to the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act, offered by Rep. Andy Biggs. It failed on a 212–212 tie — in the House, a tie loses. A single member switching would have changed the outcome.

Darin LaHood voted No.

He then voted Aye on final passage of that bill — RISAA — which extended the surveillance authority for two years with no warrant requirement attached.

What that database is, in one paragraph

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act lets the government collect the communications of foreign targets located overseas without a warrant. Almost nobody disputes that it's valuable. The fight has always been over the other end of those conversations: when an American emails, texts or calls a foreign target, the American's words land in the same database. And the FBI can go into that database, type in an American's name, and read what's there — no warrant, no probable cause, no judge.

That is called a U.S.-person query, or the backdoor search. The Biggs amendment would have ended it. LaHood's vote kept it.

He knew exactly what it feels like

Thirteen months before that vote, on March 9, 2023, at the House Intelligence Committee's annual worldwide threats hearing, LaHood revealed something about himself.

A declassified footnote in an intelligence oversight report had described improper FBI database queries of "a US Congressman." LaHood had read the classified version. From his own statement that day:

"I have had the opportunity to review the classified summary of this violation, and it is my opinion that the member of Congress that was wrongfully queried multiple times solely by his name was in fact me."

He called it "an egregious violation that not only degrades trust in FISA and the Intelligence Community (IC) but is a threat to the foundational values of our democracy."

And he drew a line:

"Reauthorization of Section 702 without reform is a non-starter."

Then the reform reached the floor, and it was a warrant requirement, and he voted it down on a vote decided by a tie.

Three years later, "clean"

Section 702 came up for renewal again in 2026, with a hard sunset. LaHood is now chairman of the Intelligence Committee's Subcommittee on the National Security Agency and Cyber, and vice chairman of its CIA subcommittee. He is, in other words, one of the people who decides.

He sat down with Martin Matishak of Recorded Future News in his Capitol Hill office on Thursday, March 19, 2026, immediately after that year's worldwide threats hearing; the interview ran the next day. His position: back President Trump's proposal for an 18-month "clean" reauthorization — no warrant requirement attached.

"This is the singular most important collection item we have in our intelligence portfolio."

In the same interview Matishak put to him Recorded Future News's own finding that FBI queries of the database had risen by about 35% from the previous year. LaHood said he had been briefed and was satisfied, and gave the explanations he had been given: the 2024 reforms working as intended, drug cartel investigations, and administrative errors like misspellings.

Renewal without reform, he had said, was a non-starter. In 2026 he was the one carrying it, and it would take, in his words, "a little political muscle."

To be fair to him

Two things belong in the record.

First, LaHood is not a bystander who never lifted a finger. He chaired the Intelligence Committee's FISA Working Group, raised the violation at an open Intelligence Committee hearing where FBI Director Christopher Wray was testifying, and RISAA did contain real changes — FBI personnel barred from running U.S.-person queries without supervisor or attorney approval, higher criminal and civil penalties, and a requirement that the FBI notify any member of Congress whose name is queried. LaHood's honest position is that reform already happened in 2024, and that the warrant requirement was the wrong reform.

Second, that is an argument people make in good faith. Intelligence officials say a warrant requirement would slow down urgent counterterrorism work, and that a "query" of already-lawfully-collected data isn't the same as a new search.

But the argument sits badly next to the specific facts of his own case. What happened to LaHood was not a slow-moving counterterrorism emergency. It was an FBI employee typing a congressman's name into a search box, more than once, in violation of the rules that already existed. Rules that already existed are exactly what failed. A warrant requirement is the reform designed for that failure, and it is the one he voted down.

How it ended

It ended badly for everyone. The House passed a three-year extension 235–191 on April 29, 2026, Congress bought itself six more weeks with a stopgap running to June 12, and then negotiations collapsed. Section 702 lapsed in June 2026 — the first time the authority had gone dark since Congress created it in 2008.

The people who wanted a warrant requirement did not get one. The people who wanted a clean renewal did not get that either. What the country got was the thing both sides said they were trying to prevent.

And in Illinois

LaHood has represented central Illinois since 2015 — eleven years — and he is on the ballot again in November. Through the spring 2025 push for an in-person town hall he would not commit either way; asked about it, he told WCBU's Joe Deacon "I meet with any constituent that wants to meet with me" and "in the past, I've had lots of town halls throughout my district" — but, the story notes, he "did not commit one way or another to holding a town hall." In April 2025, constituents filled the UAW Hall in East Peoria for a town hall they held without him.

If anyone gets the chance, the question is short. In 2023 he said renewal without reform was a non-starter. Which reform did he mean?

We deserve better.

Source

"LaHood Addresses Violations and Need for FISA Reform," lahood.house.gov, March 9, 2023; Martin Matishak, "Rep. LaHood on why Section 702 reauthorization will take a 'little political muscle,'" The Record from Recorded Future News, March 20, 2026. Roll call 114 of the 2nd session of the 118th Congress from the Office of the Clerk. Photo: U.S. Institute of Peace via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0), via The Record.