Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I rise in total opposition to the rule for H.R. 5825, the Electronic Surveillance Act, and the underlying bill. The FISA law the President chose to ignore, and that this bill seeks to bypass, is a law that powerfully symbolizes both the risk of the abuse of executive power and the strength of our system of checks and balances. Now, the FISA law was enacted to protect against very real abuses in the name of fighting communism, if you remember. Not terrorism then, it was communism. Our executive branch, through the likes of J. Edgar Hoover and COINTELPRO perpetrated massive abuses and surveillance of innocent Americans. These abuses included the surveillance, among many others, of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his wife Coretta as part of what the Church Commission described as 'an intensive campaign by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to neutralize him as an effective civil rights leader.' The only thing that redeems our Nation's great shame at these abuses was that the system of checks and balances created by our Constitution worked.”