House Holds Rare 'Closed Session'

UPDATE 4:12 PM ET: House Democratic leaders have agreed to the GOP's request that the chamber go into secret session today to discuss terrorist surveillance legislation. The session will last one hour, with the time equally divided between the majority and the minority.

ORIGINAL POST: House Republicans plan to call later this afternoon for the chamber to hold only its sixth "closed session" in history to discuss updating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Democrats have not yet decided whether they will support the move, which requires a floor vote, saying only that the idea is "under discussion."

Such closed or "secret" sessions occur only when members want to be able to reference classified information during a Congressional debate. In this case, Republicans want to use the session to make their point -- which Democrats strongly dispute -- that Congress' failure to update FISA is hurting intelligence operations.

The House has not gone into closed session since July 1983, when it did so to discuss U.S. support for the Contras in Nicaragua.

In September 2006, then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) tried to force the House into secret session to review a national intelligence estimate on global terrorism, but her effort failed on a party-line vote. The Senate has gone into closed session dozens of times in the past, mainly because it only takes one Senator to trigger such a session in that chamber. (A full list of past closed sessions in both the House and Senate is available in this Congressional Research Service report.)

Because it's been more than two decades since one was held in the House, members and staff are a bit fuzzy on how the mechanics of a closed session would work. If the House votes to go into secret session, the House floor would be cleared and electronically swept for listening devices. The galleries for both visitors and press would be cleared, Capitol Police officers would be posted at all the doors to the chamber and C-SPAN would be unable to broadcast the proceedings.

Republicans are expected to make their call for a closed session after the House finished voting on the fiscal 2009 budget resolution, sometime after 4 p.m. Democrats had hoped to complete both the budget bill and their latest version of FISA today, but a secret session might push the FISA vote to Friday.