Alcee Hastings: “for a year and a half, the Intelligence and Judiciary Committees have been working with the administration to craft a…”

“for a year and a half, the Intelligence and Judiciary Committees have been working with the administration to craft a bill that will ensure our Nation is protected, without sacrificing American constitutional liberties. Let me just talk about some of the people that have had input into that particular measure. The chairman of the Judiciary Committee, John Conyers; the chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, Silvestre Reyes; the ranking members of both of those committees, including Mr. Hoekstra; all of the members of the Select Committee on Intelligence, including myself; Ms. Harman, who serves on Homeland Security. Countless testimonies during that year and a half, hundreds of discussions and negotiations between the staffs of the respective committees, and a markup of this particular provision that the Republicans brought only two amendments to in the markup in the Select Committee on Intelligence. We negotiated. We compromised. We reached an agreement. Then the administration backed out of the agreement. So we negotiated some more. We compromised some more. We reached another agreement. We reached agreements until we were blue in the face here in August. Everybody was so tired, and the administration continued to back out of the agreement. Then, less than 24 hours before the bill was supposed to come to the floor in August, the administration reneged on the agreement and refused to work with us to protect the American people.”