Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, when I was majority leader in 2008, Mr. Blunt, who was then in the leadership of the Republican Party, Senator Kit Bond, and Senator Jay Rockefeller, who co-chaired the Intel Committee in the United States Senate, and I worked together in a very difficult context. That context was that the Bush administration had asked for information from the telecoms. The telecoms had given them information, and there were really no firewalls as to what that information was. The four of us worked with the Intelligence Committee of the House to come up with legislation which would solve the problem of making sure that we were secure as a country and that the privacy of our citizens was secure. We think we accomplished that objective. In fact, the leadership in the Senate voted for it. President Obama, then a Member of the Senate, voted for it. Ms. Pelosi, Mr. Clyburn, and I voted for it, along with others. The Republicans were overwhelmingly for it. In September 2012, we did it again. Ms. Pelosi, Mr. Hoyer, and Mr. Clyburn voted for it. We did it again in January 2018, and Pelosi, Hoyer, Clyburn, Ryan, McCarthy, and Scalise all voted for it.”