Political Quotes

“I thank the gentleman for yielding. I support the rule, but like the gentleman, I will not support the legislation unless we get this warrant amendment requirement in the legislation itself. Query is a fancy name for search, and the intelligence community will tell us right now there are 200,000 queries, 200,000 searches that take place every year on U.S. persons, on American citizens--200,000 a year. Those things are done on American citizens without a warrant, and this is the FBI that my friend and member of the Committee on Rules just talked about, who has abused the system. Mr. Speaker, 278,000 times. It is not Mr. Roy, not Mr. Jordan, that is giving you that number. That is the number from The Washington Post, 278,000 times. The Inspector General at the Justice Department determined that FBI did not follow the previous rules when they searched this database on U.S. persons. Now, we are supposed to believe, Oh, we have new rules, stricter rules, better rules--and I am all for those--now they are going to follow the new rules. They didn't follow the old ones but now they are going to follow the new. Why don't we go to the tried-and-true method. If you have the executive branch wanting to look at American citizens' information, they have to go to a separate and equal branch of the government, the judicial branch, and get a probable cause warrant. It has worked pretty darn well for 200-plus years in the greatest country ever, but somehow, we can't do it here?…”