Political Quotes

“This amendment, ladies and gentlemen, is fairly simple and straightforward, but it bears discussion for a few moments. It requires the bill to expire of its own terms within 5 years. It's what we call in this business a sunset clause. And by its own terms, if the bill is passed, it will automatically cease to be, cease to be enforceable after 5 years unless this body acts affirmatively to renew it. Generally, I think this is good policy with most things that we do in Washington, D.C. In fact, several people say that one of the biggest difficulties we have in this town is that we simply create laws all the time and they never go away. So generally speaking, I think sunset clauses are to be admired and to be encouraged. Even more so is the case, however, when we deal with situations where we have concerns regarding individual liberties. We've worked very, very hard to make this bill a good bill. It is an excellent bill. I'm proud to be a cosponsor of this bill. But every single time that we start moving into the realm where the government action starts to bump up against individual liberties, it's a good idea to take a pause after this certain amount of time, in this case 5 years, and look our hands over, look over the actual implementation of the bill and make sure that we did exactly what we thought that we were going to do.…”