Jon Kyl: “one of the key items of business that we have to do before Christmas is to reauthorize the PATRIOT Act. I know there is…”

“one of the key items of business that we have to do before Christmas is to reauthorize the PATRIOT Act. I know there is some confusion about exactly where we stand on that. Let me clarify that right now. First, where are we with respect to the reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act? Why? And what can we do to move forward? I think most folks by now appreciate the fact that after September 11, we understood there were significant problems with our law and we needed to make some changes to fill in some loopholes and to make changes that would give our law enforcement and intelligence agencies the tools they needed to fight this new enemy, the terrorists. As a result, we passed the PATRIOT Act. But we said we wanted to sunset provisions of the PATRIOT Act so that we would have to revisit them before they would become permanent law. We are now at that point. The law will expire on December 31 unless we reauthorize it. So the Senate worked on it for about 8 months. We passed a version of the PATRIOT Act to be reauthorized. The House of Representatives did the same thing. There were some modest differences between the two bodies. We created a conference committee to iron out the differences, and I served on that committee. The Senate got most of its way in the conference committee. Most people have said about 80 percent of the compromising was done by the House. Nonetheless, the version we have before us is a version that I support.…”