Speaker Mike Johnson is punting a controversial spy powers bill as GOP infighting threatens to derail his plans once again.

The House was expected to hold a floor vote on legislation to reauthorize Section 702 on Thursday. The authority is meant to target foreigners abroad but has come under scrutiny for its ability to sweep in Americans’ information.

But GOP leadership knew they would have a hard time pushing the bill through, at best. Republican security hawks on the Intelligence Committee were threatening to prevent the bill from even coming up for debate — a detail first reported by POLITICO — while privacy advocates on the Judiciary Committee were vowing to oppose it unless they got amendment votes to further protect Americans’ information.

“In order to allow Congress more time to reach consensus on how best to reform FISA and Section 702 while maintaining the integrity of our critical national security programs, the House will consider the reform and reauthorization bill at a later date,” Raj Shah, a spokesperson for Johnson, wrote on X.

The legislation that was pulled included narrower changes to Section 702 than those preferred by the Judiciary Committee, notably forgoing strict warrant requirements related to American communications.

It’s the second punt on Section 702 from Johnson, who first wanted to bring competing bills on the surveillance authority to the floor and have members vote directly on which version they preferred. Then he had to scrap his plan after members started publicly complaining that it was Johnson’s job to make a decision.

Congress has until mid-April to figure out a path forward on Section 702. But GOP leadership had pushed their ranks to move quickly this week as they prepare to head out of town until Feb. 28. Once the House returns, the agenda will be dominated by back-to-back government funding deadlines and the very real threat of a shutdown amid a fight over the border and spending levels.

The decision appeared to catch members involved in the negotiations over the spy powers bill off guard. The announcement from the speaker’s office came during a Rules Committee meeting meant to tee up the bill, and potential amendments, for a floor vote on Thursday.

“That’s disappointing because, you know, you saw how good this meeting went,” Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) told reporters.

Anthony Adragna contributed to this report.

The White House has denied multiple requests from Speaker Mike Johnson to meet with President Joe Biden over border security, according to a person familiar with the requests.

Johnson’s team has issued “multiple” requests to the White House for a one-on-one meeting between the two leaders, according to the person, who was granted anonymity to speak frankly about a sensitive situation.

But Biden and White House officials have repeatedly said they believe the House should take up the Senate-passed national security supplemental instead of meeting and renegotiating a new package, after months of bipartisan Senate talks on the border ended in a bill that failed to even pass the upper chamber. Johnson had declared that legislation dead on arrival in the House, arguing it didn’t go far enough to tighten border security, and did not directly engage in those discussions beforehand.

“What is there to negotiate? Really, truly, what is the one-on-one negotiation about when he’s been presented with exactly what he’s asked for?” said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. “He’s negotiating with himself.”

Johnson said Wednesday that he will “continue to insist” on a meeting with Biden, as House Republicans try to draft their own solution on the border.

“If the speaker of the House can’t meet with the president of the United States, that’s a problem,” Johnson said. “I don’t know why they’re uncomfortable having the president sit across the table from me, but I will go in good faith.”

The two leaders spoke via phone on Jan. 10 and met in person with several other congressional leaders on Jan. 17.

Johnson’s team requested a meeting on Jan. 22 and made “multiple subsequent requests,” according to the person. They have all been denied.

“Members of Speaker Johnson’s own conference have stated that if these urgent national security priorities were put up for a clean vote, the legislation would pass the House with overwhelming bipartisan support – as it did in the Senate,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said. “Given that reality, combined with the fact that congressional Republicans were just dealt a major defeat for siding with fentanyl traffickers, smugglers, Donald Trump, and their personal politics over the Border Patrol Union, it makes sense the Speaker would be feeling heat and grasping for an escape hatch.”

House Homeland Security Chair Mark Green is expected to announce plans to retire as early as Thursday, marking a surprise exit for a prominent committee chief.

Green is expected to announce he will not seek reelection just days after he spearheaded the GOP push to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, according to two Republicans familiar with his plans. His exit is already coming as a shock to his colleagues given the win he’d notched with the Mayorkas vote.

Green demurred during a brief Wednesday interview when asked if he planned to retire.

“Today, I am running for election,” Green told POLITICO, while declining to discuss the matter further. He later confirmed his resignation to Axios.

Green, a former Green Beret, showed an eagerness to rise in the ranks after being elected in 2018. He made a bid for the top spot of the House Oversight Committee before later securing the gavel leading the Homeland Security panel. While at the helm this Congress, he made it a clear mission to hammer the Biden administration on the U.S.-Mexico border as the rate of illegal border crossings soared.

He ultimately proved successful in steering the Mayorkas impeachment this week, but only after the party faced an embarrassing vote miscalculation the week before where they failed to properly count the votes.

Jim Clyburn announced Wednesday he would step down from his assistant Democratic leader position in the House, completing Democrats’ recent leadership transition.

“I am confident that Leader Jeffries, Whip [Katherine] Clark, Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar, and the entire leadership team will continue the important work of putting people over politics,” he said in a statement.

Clyburn, who’s still running for reelection, had already stepped down from his position as whip when the top generation of House Democratic leadership passed the torch in the transition to the 118th Congress. He’d opted instead to run for the newly created position of assistant Democratic leader. Former Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.) initially challenged Clyburn for the spot before abandoning the bid.

Steny Hoyer and Nancy Pelosi had also stepped down from their leadership spots at the dawn of the current Congress, though they too are running for reelection. Pelosi also didn’t seek any committee assignments this Congress.

Clyburn’s leadership departure could trigger jockeying for the under-the-radar position. Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.) is launching a bid to take over as assistant leader, according to a House leadership aide. Neguse, a Clyburn protege, has had a close relationship with the South Carolinian for years.

A strong push by Republicans from New York, New Jersey and California to expand the federal deduction for state and local taxes died with a whimper in a procedural vote on Wednesday afternoon, depriving the lawmakers of a much-needed win as they head into the November elections.

The rejection of the rule — by 195-225 — to consider legislation that would provide the SALT relief was the latest setback for lawmakers from high-tax states who have tried repeatedly to relax or eliminate a $10,000 cap on the deduction imposed by Republicans’ 2017 tax law.

Their frustration was evident even before the vote.

“This House Republican majority was built by the contributions of New Yorkers, and this legislation would help those same New Yorkers see immediate tax relief,” said Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), the chief sponsor of the bill, during the debate leading up to the vote. “And I encourage my Democratic colleagues to support it as well. They talked a good game but when they had complete control in the prior Congress, they failed to provide a fix.”

Lawler’s bill would remove what some lawmakers call a “marriage penalty” in the SALT deduction by doubling the amount married couples could write off to $20,000 for the 2023 tax year. The change would be limited to taxpayers making less than $500,000.

The lawmakers demanding that relief represent critical swing districts that have oversized national political implications because they can hand either party the majority in the House.

It was a prominent issue in Tuesday’s special election to fill George Santos’s former House seat on Long Island, which was won by Democrat Tom Suozzi.

In his race against GOP candidate Mazi Melesa Pilip, Suozzi knocked New York Republicans for failing to lift the cap this Congress.

But the issue transcends party lines. Democrats from high-tax states have also pushed legislation that would expand the SALT deduction, but indicated before Wednesday’s vote they considered Lawler’s plan a half-baked response to the problem.

“This badly flawed measure is a far cry for the middle-class tax relief, and is really the bare minimum we could do,” said Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.), who counts himself as a colleague of Lawler in the bipartisan coalition, known as the SALT Caucus. “What we have before us is a fig leaf to paper over that Republicans opposed middle-class tax relief.”

Two other SALT Caucus Democrats — Reps. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) and Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) — told POLITICO Tuesday night they weren’t sure yet whether they would ultimately vote for the Republican rule to allow for House consideration of Lawler’s bill. In the end, they didn’t.

Republicans who support the deduction cap argue that it serves as a disincentive to state and local government spending fueled by taxes that could be written off at the federal level.

Before the cap was implemented in 2017 taxpayers could deduct all of what they owed in state and local tax from their federal taxes. It’s a change that has hit New York, New Jersey and California homeowners particularly hard, since high-income couples can easily pay property taxes in the tens of thousands of dollars every year in those states.

Lawler’s legislation would cost the government around $11.7 billion, according to an analysis by the conservative-leaning Tax Foundation. The vast majority of the benefit — 77 percent — would go to higher earners, making above $200,000 a year, the analysis said.

The SALT Caucus has been a thorn in the side for both parties’ leadership.

Last summer, a coalition of Republicans from high-tax states blocked a sweeping GOP tax package reported from the House Ways and Means committee because it didn’t also include an increase in the deduction. And last month, four New York Republicans threatened to tank bipartisan tax legislation over similar concerns.

The latter conflict was resolved when the band of rabble rousers came to an accord with Speaker Mike Johnson’s office that Lawler’s bill would get a fair shake by the GOP conference.

In 2021, Democrats struggled to build a coalition around their sweeping climate, tax and healthcare agenda because a handful of their members demanded larger SALT deductions — which have otherwise been considered a tax break for the wealthy and unpalatable to a wide swath of the Democratic caucus. That effort failed too.

Despite the crash of Lawler’s bill, New Jersey, California and New York Republicans are eyeing another big push for SALT tax breaks in 2025 — when most of the 2017 tax cuts, including the $10,000 SALT cap, are set to expire.

“2025 is the year for SALT,” said Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.) on CNN Tuesday night. “I think that’s where the New York members are going to have their most leverage.”

Two of the GOP’s biggest personalities on the Hill are in a war of words over the $95 billion foreign aid bill that recently passed the Senate.

Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) blasted Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) as a “liar” on Wednesday for claiming that he’s talking to House Republicans about signing onto a Hail Mary strategy for forcing a vote on the foreign aid plan — a bill that Mullin voted against in the wee hours of Tuesday morning.

“.@MattGaetzis a liar,” Mullin wrote in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Those of us who have worked with him already know that. He should focus on his own ethics issues instead of spreading false Hill rumors.”

Mullin’s use of the term “ethics issues” is almost certainly a subtle nod to the House’s ongoing internal inquiry into allegations of sexual encounters between Gaetz and teenage girls, the subject of a federal investigation that ended without charges about a year ago. The Oklahoman hit back after Gaetz referred to Mullin, a former House member who’s close to ex-Speaker Kevin McCarthy, as a “neoconservative” who “didn’t have the guts to vote for” the aid package.

Gaetz’s claim that Mullin is secretly working to pass a bill he voted against appears to stem from a report in The Washington Post where Mullin described “different scenarios” to pass the bill through the House. Some interpreted that comment to mean a Democratic-led discharge petition that would circumvent GOP leadership.

Mullin rebutted the idea he was supportive of a discharge petition on Tuesday as “fake news,” saying he’d instead “spoken to @SpeakerJohnson about ways to enact President Trump’s loan ideas for foreign aid.”

There’s no love lost between Mullin and Gaetz, to put it mildly. Mullin made a series of X-rated accusations to CNN about the Florida Republican after Gaetz helped spearhead the ouster of McCarthy in October.

The since-resigned McCarthy, in remarks to reporters on Tuesday on Capitol Hill, said Gaetz was “very concerned about” the Ethics Committee probe “and wanted me to do something about it. I wouldn’t. It’d be illegal.”

Olivia Beavers contributed.

Speaker Mike Johnson is experiencing some deja vu as he tries to revive a controversial spy fight — and the second attempt is running into the same buzzsaw as the first.

Two opposing factions of the House GOP are both threatening to tank the reauthorization of a critical intelligence surveillance tool as Republicans remain locked in a long-running standoff. One side of the debate views sweeping changes as vital to Americans’ privacy rights and the other warns new limits would critically undermine national security by effectively neutering the program.

The House clash — between Republican security hawks on the Intelligence Committee and GOP privacy advocates on the Judiciary Committee — is a particularly sore point for Johnson’s leadership. He’s facing criticism from every corner about how he’s handled the spy powers fight, with members predicting the bill would be blocked if Johnson tries to bring it up for a quick vote Thursday.

“There’s provisions in there that are just problematic. It hasn’t gone through regular order. It’s a whole mess,” said Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas), a member of the Intelligence Committee. “That’s why we’ll probably just vote against the rule and take it down.”

The House Rules Committee plans to meet on Wednesday to tee up the bill to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Both sides of the debate want votes on significant changes if it goes to the floor on Thursday.

Section 702 revolves around an authority that is intended to target foreigners abroad but has become controversial because of its ability to sweep up Americans’ information. The legislation set for consideration includes narrower changes than those preferred by the Judiciary Committee, notably forgoing strict warrant requirements related to American communications.

Privacy hawks are trying to amend the bill on the floor and add language to address two issues: Requiring a warrant before searching for Americans’ information and placing limits on the ability for data brokers to sell consumer information to law enforcement. A provision related to the latter was already tucked into the bill that leadership rolled out on Monday — which in turn has rankled the security advocates on the Intelligence Committee.

Those members argue that change is unrelated to the surveillance authority up for renewal, and opens the door for privacy hawks to offer more sweeping changes this week.

Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), a close ally of House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), indicated he was aware of the counter threat to knock down the bill, but they would still push amendment votes.

“They are like: ‘We don’t really want to vote on these things,’” Davidson said about his Intelligence Committee colleagues. “I’m not asking for a guaranteed outcome on whether something is going to pass … but I am asking for a vote.”

Davidson is part of a coalition that spans Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, the ultra-conservative Freedom Caucus and their respective allies, who view getting votes on a warrant requirement and the data broker language as essential. Otherwise, they warn they would prevent the bill from even being brought up.

That could easily happen in the Rules Committee, if conservative Reps. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Chip Roy (R-Texas) vote against bringing the bill to the floor in the panel’s Wednesday meeting. Even if it gets approved there, at full attendance it only takes four Republicans joining with Democrats to block the bill from coming up for debate on the floor.

Jordan, when asked by POLITICO if he’d support the underlying bill if the warrant amendment fails, replied: “The warrant needs to be in there. Definitely needs to be in there.”

“We have to have these amendments. Like, there’s no way we’re not going to have them,” he said, noting that he told Johnson that the Judiciary Committee should have their privacy-minded bill on the floor and then there could be an amendment vote to strike the warrant language in their legislation.

But “the speaker does what he wants,” Jordan added.

Rather, House Intelligence Committee members believe that, behind closed doors, Johnson has indicated he’d support their security-favored efforts. But he has apparently not advertised that position to the conference broadly, prompting further frustration as members view him as indecisive on the issue.

Some Republicans have also complained that they went through a working group process at the behest of leadership, only for Johnson to reopen negotiations on things that were rejected by the group.

Johnson on Tuesday defended the process and noted that Republicans will get the chance to change the bill.

“We have a great base text that’s been filed,” Johnson told reporters during a press conference. “And there’s an amendment process that’s being worked through.”

Speaker Mike Johnson won’t take the Senate-passed national security supplemental as is, insisting House Republicans will write their own legislation. Democrats are trying to plot a path around him.

Johnson in a statement late Monday dismissed the $95 billion Senate bill with aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan because it failed to include provisions to tighten border security. He said in a statement: “In the absence of having received any single border policy change from the Senate, the House will have to continue to work its own will on these important matters.”

Previously, the Louisiana Republican and other conservatives had worked to kill a bipartisan border-foreign aid deal because they said it didn’t go far enough to stem the flow of migrants across the border. That compromise failed in the Senate last week, after Johnson said it was dead on arrival in the House. And legislation that has stricter border policies — like the conservative-favored H.R. 2 — would almost certainly run into Democratic opposition in the upper chamber. It all indicates that the months-long fight over foreign aid and border security still has a ways to go.

Still, a Johnson aide, granted anonymity to speak candidly, told POLITICO Tuesday that Johnson won’t be “boxed” into the Senate plan. Instead, House Republicans would find their own remedy to address the national security and border issues. Johnson is facing conservative pressure to oppose any Ukraine funding and fight for H.R. 2, a border bill the House passed last year on partisan lines, with some members hinting they would seek to oust him if the GOP leader put Ukraine aid legislation on the floor.

“He’s saying the current bill won’t be processed in the House and why,” the aide said.

Meanwhile, Democrats are hoping they can box Johnson in, pushing a procedural maneuver known as a discharge petition that would allow them to force a floor vote on the Senate-passed bill. Critically, though, Democrats need a majority of House members to sign on, including a handful of House Republicans. It’s unclear if they’ll get that backing.

Every House Democrat has signed onto a shell discharge petition that could be used to force a vote as soon as it has the necessary signatures. And some Republicans have held quiet conversations with Democrats about a path forward but, so far, no Republicans have joined.

Johnson has criticized that effort, saying Tuesday afternoon: “I certainly oppose it, and I hope that it would not be considered. The House has to work its will on this. There’s a deliberative process, and we’re engaged in that and we’ll see how it goes.”

Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) told POLITICO last week that he was spearheading a bill with Democrats that would link foreign aid, including for Ukraine, to a border measure.

“I’m working with a few Democrats on it. It’s going to address the problem in a much more narrow fashion,” said the centrist Republican, who said they will “figure out a way” to get his measure to the floor.

Conservatives are supportive of Johnson’s moves to block the Senate-passed bill, even those who are typically critical of the GOP leader.

“The good news is that Johnson has publicly stated that we’ve got to do something on the border before we do anything like that,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), a member of the House Freedom Caucus, said on “The John Fredericks Show” Tuesday morning.

But, the former Freedom Caucus chair was quick to note: “If it were to get to the floor, it would pass — let’s just be frank about that.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer implored Johnson to take up the legislation in a Tuesday press conference, saying “if the hard-right kills this bill, it would be an enormous gift to Vladimir Putin.” But the Senate Democrat deferred to Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries on how to pursue a discharge petition.

And it’s not just Democrats who want Johnson to act. Even as he embraces his right flank by refusing to take up the Senate bill, there are other corners of his conference who view more financial help for Israel and Ukraine as essential. And many of those lawmakers are sick of seeing leaders bow to conservative priorities that have no shot in a Democratic-controlled Senate.

Some Republicans have floated considering pieces of a foreign aid package separately. That would let Republicans vote for Israel aid and lean on Democrats to help pass Ukraine aid. Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) told POLITICO last week that he’s discussing a stand-alone bill on Ukraine military aid with a group of lawmakers.

And Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Turner (R-Ohio) — who led a trip last week to Ukraine to try to reiterate the United States’ support — predicted that Johnson will ultimately allow for a vote on the Senate-passed bill. Notably, Johnson’s statement did not rule out the House eventually taking it up.

“The speaker will need to bring it to the floor,” he said.