Political Quotes

“Madam Speaker, I thank and compliment the chairman and the ranking member--and the chairman and ranking member of the Committee on the Judiciary--for doing such good and bipartisan work at this rather tense and polarized time around reauthorizing a number of authorities that have been, not just important, but essential to keeping the American public safe. And they did that, of course, mindful of the need to balance those authorities and those activities with the very legitimate civil liberties interests that we all have, and with our obligation to the Constitution, which we all swear an oath to support and defend. Madam Speaker, as the chairman said, this bill will reauthorize, even as it imposes additional oversight, a couple of very important authorities, while ending the authority that I think in the last several years was most problematic to me, to many people in this Chamber, and to the American people, which was the bulk collection of telephone metadata. That was a debate that led to the original USA FREEDOM Act of 2015, to those reforms, and gets us to where we are today where Americans can know that the NSA, a foreign intelligence agency, will not be collecting their records, their metadata. And I believe that that is a very substantial achievement in today's bill. I would like to take a moment, though, to wrestle with a charge that was leveled by my friends and colleagues on the progressive side, and their recommendation with respect to this bill.…”