Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I want to be very brief. I know colleagues are facing tough weather and are trying to deal with the logistics of all that. I just want to close with a couple of points. The first is that I have heard several of my colleagues say to me that a central reason for voting for Congressman Pompeo this afternoon is that they have said that he voted for the USA FREEDOM Act. That is correct. The problem is that just a few months after he cast that vote, the Congressman turned around and said he wanted to reestablish the bulk phone record program in a way that was vastly more encompassing and way more intrusive than the USA FREEDOM Act abolished. What he was proposing after he voted for the USA FREEDOM Act, which says that Congress says you ought to have limits, was a bulk metadata program that was way beyond anything that the Bush-Cheney administration ever imagined. I have been on the Senate Intelligence Committee since before September 11. I have been in the middle of countless debates about the appropriate scope of government surveillance, but I have never heard-- not from anyone--an idea that was so extreme and so overreaching and so intrusive of Americans' privacy. I bring this up only by way of saying that, if confirmed, the nominee is going to be dealing with a whole host of issues that, if we really think it through carefully and thoughtfully, we can find a way to ensure that Americans have security and liberty and that the two are not mutually exclusive.…”