Political Quotes

“I rise in support of this 15-day extension to the FISA law, but I ask the question, why are we here? And the reason we are here is because of a court decision that I think appropriately defined the letter of the language in the 1978 FISA law. But because the technology changes, that court decision was made. And that opened up this can of worms, this Pandora's box of who's concerned about whose civil liberties versus how we provide this balance in our intelligence. And I would point out that this is a two-front war that we're fighting: One is in the Middle East, successfully I will add, and the other one is the surveillance that protects us domestically here at home and provides for our military to have the tools to work with overseas. That is the highest constitutional responsibility that we have. We have congressional oversight. We can look into this and see what's going on with the FISA law anyway, but the effort to protect our retroactive liability of those companies that cooperate with our intelligence community is essential. We will lose our ability to do surveillance if we lose the ability of the companies to cooperate with us. And this is not a trial lawyer's issue; it's a national security issue.”