Political Quotes

“Madam President, I would like to begin my remarks by focusing on what we are debating and what we are not debating. We really need clarity on this point of order and what it is about. To be perfectly clear, what this point of order would do would simply be to remove from the National Defense Authorization Act a nongermane reauthorization of a surveillance authority--section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act--that has a well-documented history of abuse. Including the reauthorization in the NDAA, of course, violates rule XXVIII of the Senate rules governing conference reports. This particular provision was airdropped into the National Defense Authorization Act, notwithstanding the absence of any predicate for that provision either in the House version or the Senate version of the bill, which, of course, the conference committee was created to iron out. It was created to iron out the differences between those two bills. Because it was in neither version, the Senate Parliamentarian correctly concluded that this is a nongermane addition to the measure, and as such, it is subject to a rule XXVIII point of order. What this means as a practical matter today is this comes out; it comes out unless 60 Senators make a deliberate, conscious choice and make that choice by voting to waive rule XXVIII. They would be saying: Yeah, it is not germane. Yeah, it wasn't in the House version or the Senate version. Notwithstanding that, we want it in there anyway.…”