Political Quotes

“Mr. President, Americans want their privacy protected. For far too long, the Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, commonly referred to as FISA, have been used to trample the civil liberties of American citizens. For Montanans, the right to privacy is so fundamental that it is enshrined in our own constitution. In fact, very few States have such protections, but the drafters of the Montana Constitution recognized that privacy was essential to exercising all of the other freedoms that we hold so dear. The bill the U.S. House has sent us does have some good reforms, and it has some good provisions in it, including a provision from my bipartisan bill with my colleague from Oregon, Senator Wyden, called the Safeguarding Americans' Private Records Act, which would revoke the now terminated call detail record program, which secretly collected data on our cell phones and our land lines, as well as on our private conversations. Yet the House bill fails to enact real reforms to FISA that will actually protect the privacy of the American people. We saw what a handful of scornful government bureaucrats did to President Trump when they abused FISA to serve their political motives. Our own government spied on an American citizen--a political adviser to then-Candidate Trump--with no oversight. What happened to President Trump can happen to anybody for any purpose, and that is a very serious problem.…”