Jon Kyl: “The Senator from Illinois certainly makes the point that when you have a longer deadline, work tends to be put off. I…”

“The Senator from Illinois certainly makes the point that when you have a longer deadline, work tends to be put off. I make this point: The distinguished chairman of the Judiciary Committee is here. We have been working for the better part of a year on this reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act. The chairman can tell us when the Judiciary Committee took it up. There were a lot of sessions before that. For many months now, this issue of reauthorization has been well known to all of us. We have known what the deadline was, and we worked on it and worked on it hard. I think people of good faith have reached the degree of compromise they believe they can reach at this point. Given the fact that most of the concessions were made by our House colleagues and that they have indicated they are not ready to make any additional concessions and that the President has made it clear he does not want to see the act degraded any further than the conference report presented to us, I suggest that at some point legislators need to make a decision either to vote yes or no and not to hide behind what is, in effect, a procedural vote--namely, a filibuster--and saying: We are really for it; that wasn't really a vote to kill it; we were just voting not to vote on it. When you filibuster a bill, when you vote not to vote on something, it is the same thing as voting against it in practical effect when the act expires on December 31.…”