On the recordMay 20, 2015
I thank the Senator from New Mexico for coming down and for being a great supporter of the Fourth Amendment. One of the things I think is interesting is that in our current culture we seem to devalue the Fourth Amendment. You go to--at least on our side--all kinds of groupings and gatherings, and there is a lot of talk of the Second Amendment, talk of the First Amendment, but there hasn't been so much of the Fourth Amendment until we got to this point with the collection of data seeming to be running amok. One of our Founding Fathers was George Mason. He was considered to be an anti-Federalist. He was a guy who really stood on principle, but also he was a guy who had the audacity to actually not sign the Constitution, even though he was asked and he was there and could have. On September 17, 1787, he refused to sign the Constitution and returned to his native State as an outspoken opponent of the ratification contest. His objection to the proposed Constitution was that it lacked a declaration of rights. Mason felt that a declaration of rights--or what we call a bill of rights--was a necessity in order to curb Federal overreach. Mason, though, was also famous for being an author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which was written a decade or so before our Constitution and upon which many things were based. He wrote in the first paragraph of the U.S.…
