Louie Gohmert: “I thank my friend from Iowa, my very dear friend. As my friend knows, he and I've both been extremely vigilant in…”

“I thank my friend from Iowa, my very dear friend. As my friend knows, he and I've both been extremely vigilant in following up on these issues. But I wanted to point out, there is a lot of confusion. There are people on television that are just making these claims that the Constitution has been thrown away, and they haven't looked at how these three provisions that have been extended for 4 years were being used. Now, my first year here, 2005, we were taking up the Patriot Act, and I had concerns then. I still have concerns, because these things, these powers, these three have been held constitutional, and I think they are. The problem comes in the potential for abuse. And the reason I ended up catching a lot of grief from some of the leaders in our party back in 2005 as a freshman was I wanted to have sunsets on some provisions so that we could get leverage, because as we saw from Attorney General Gonzales, when he was head of the Justice Department, and as we have seen with Attorney General Holder, Departments of Justice are not very forthcoming no matter what party they are when the Congress asks for information. Now, they will say, Oh, yeah, we'll give you whatever you need, but they're not very forthcoming.…”