John Cornyn: “I wish to speak about the USA PATRIOT Act. As you know, the Senate has recently agreed to another temporary extension of…”

“I wish to speak about the USA PATRIOT Act. As you know, the Senate has recently agreed to another temporary extension of this act. We have twice since December been in a position of having to offer, instead of permanent reauthorization, a temporary fix. Yet at a time when so many in this body are continuing to talk about security, this one piece of legislation, in my humble opinion, has been more important in terms of protecting the security of the United States than anything else we have done since September 11. This critical law, which, of course, provides law enforcement agencies with the vital tools necessary to fight and win the war on terror, should not be allowed to expire. I, frankly, am at a loss to explain why we are spending so much time trying to get to final closure on this legislation when the merits of the legislation seem to be so obvious--primarily by providing tools to law enforcement and intelligence agencies of this country, tools that are already in broad use in other aspects of law enforcement investigations. Unfortunately, it seems to me that there has been a certain amount of hysteria whipped up over this to cause people to have unreasonable fear and concern about civil liberties, when, in fact, the balance between security and civil liberties has been struck in an entirely appropriate way in this legislation.…”