Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I rise this morning to discuss what happened at the end of the debate in the House of Representatives on section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Particularly, I am going to be talking about the sweeping new authorities that were slipped into the legislation at that time by the chair of the House Intelligence Committee. Then I intend to respond to each of the major arguments that have been given over the last couple of days in an attempt to justify these expanded authorities in that provision that was added at the last moment and why they do not hold water. The chair of the House Intelligence Committee called this amendment-- expanding all of these authorities--he called it merely technical. I want to explain why it is not just technical and how it passed the House with virtually no debate. As the Presiding Officer and I have talked about, this has never been considered--repeat, never been considered--here in the U.S. Senate, but Members of the Senate are now being told the same thing that came up in the House: Nothing to see here. It is technical. And it is all classified. So stop asking questions. Now, I have spoken to a number of colleagues here, and I have urged them to just read the plain language of the provision. When they do so, they will see for themselves that this is actually a very substantial and dangerous expansion of warrantless surveillance authorities.…”