On the recordMarch 6, 2013
Madam President, one of the things I hear at home, similar to what the Senator from Wyoming is talking about, is that we hear people worried about the erosion of their rights. They worry about statements from the President when the President says he intends to protect the Constitution--except for maybe when it is infeasible or when it is inconvenient. I think that worries people. One of the other things about drones, which is not particularly related to this, necessarily, but I know in Wyoming I bet they have the same concerns, is our farmers are not too happy about the government flying drones over their property. That is something on which we had an interesting vote last year. We had a vote on whether the EPA could continue these without explaining to us. Once again, it was sort of similar to this fight in the sense that we wanted to stop the drone flights over farms. It was a pretty simple request, an easy request until we got the government to explain what kind of criteria, what kind of rules they were using for flying over farms. We got 56 Senators to vote to ban these drone flights until we got more information. But it is like a lot of other things in the Senate, it took 60 votes, so we didn't actually quite win even though we had a majority. With regard to what we are trying to accomplish through this, the main thing we want is a public acknowledgment from the President or from the Attorney General, saying that their policy is not to kill noncombatants in America.…
Source
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