Christopher Shays: “Mr. Chairman, when you give the administration of any party the kind of powers we need to give an administration today…”

“Mr. Chairman, when you give the administration of any party the kind of powers we need to give an administration today, you have to have a strong whistleblower statute, a strong civil liberties board, and aggressive congressional oversight. There are two inconvenient truths we need to deal with, in society today. One is what Al Gore talks about: the environment, and national security issues related to the environment. Another inconvenient truth is what the 9/11 Commission points out to us, that we are confronting deadly radical Islamist terrorism. And that requires stronger statutes to deal with it. We had an attempt in the late eighties by the first President Bush to have a workable whistleblower statute. That statute was eroded by the Federal Court in D.C. We saw the Clinton administration try to strengthen it in 1994, and again it was weakened by the courts. This is another attempt to strengthen this statute. We have a weakness in our whistleblower statute that we must address. And it is being addressed on a bipartisan basis.”