Political Quotes

“So we need a probable cause warrant requirement. Now, all of the sky-is-falling predictions about why that would be so bad to have a probable cause warrant requirement is really not addressing the facts here. Look, I think we would have been just fine had we adopted what is known as the Biggs amendment--you know, the amendment that failed by a tied vote 212 to 212. And it failed, I believe, because they gaveled out the second they saw that it was tied, even though there were still more Members coming to the floor to vote--more Members coming to the floor to vote--I was over there at the time--who were believed to be intending to support it. They gaveled out the second they thought they could get away with it and make it fail. One of the reasons why it didn't get more votes is because of the scare tactics associated with that and overblown, exaggerated concerns that it would just make it impossible. You know, I heard members of the intelligence community argue that it would just necessarily bring an abrupt halt to everything we do in this area. It is not credible. It is not true. But even if that were true, let's indulge that for purposes of this discussion. The same concerns are minimized by the warrant requirement in the Durbin amendment. In the Durbin amendment, the warrant requirement would be triggered not at the moment of the query itself, but at the moment they want to open the results of the query so they could see whether the particular U.S. person, the U.S.…”