Patrick Leahy: “first, if I might, I wish to compliment my colleague and neighbor from across the Connecticut River, Senator Sununu of…”

“first, if I might, I wish to compliment my colleague and neighbor from across the Connecticut River, Senator Sununu of New Hampshire. He has laid out very clearly and eloquently the reasons we should not be rushed into a bad bill. It is not because any of us here have any love of terrorists. Of course none of us do; no Americans do. On a September morning 4 years ago, nearly 3,000 lives, American lives, were lost--not in a foreign nation but on our own soil. Our lives as Americans changed in an instant. There is not a person within this Chamber who does not remember exactly where he or she was when they heard the news of the attacks of 9/11. In the aftermath of those attacks, Congress moved swiftly to pass antiterterrorism legislation. We moved as a Congress, as a Senate, as a House--not as Republicans or as Democrats, but as Americans, united in our efforts. The fires were still smoldering at Ground Zero in New York City when the USA PATRIOT Act became law on October 30, 2001, just 6 weeks after the attacks. I know how hard we worked. I was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time. Many of us here in the Senate today worked together in that spirit of bipartisan unity. We resolved to craft a bill that would make us safer as a nation. Freedom and security are always in tension in our society, especially so in those somber weeks after the attacks. We tried our best to strike the right balance between freedom and security.…”