Jim Sensenbrenner: “When James Madison wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, one of his overriding concerns was to prevent any…”

“When James Madison wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, one of his overriding concerns was to prevent any branch of the three in government from becoming too powerful. That is why he put the checks and balances in the Constitution, so that the other branches could oversee and make sure that a branch that was trying to push the edge of the envelope would not be able to succeed in that. The warrant amendment that has been talked about quite a bit today during the debate really is not effective. It is nothing at all. It ends up putting James Madison's legacy into the trash bin of history, and it does not deserve to go there. Yesterday, The Washington Post reported that FBI officials told aides of Mr. Nadler that, under the proposed bill--meaning the underlying bill--they anticipate rarely, if ever, needing permission from the FISC to review query results. So this warrant requirement of the supporters of the bill and the opponents of the amendment basically doesn't mean anything at all because the FBI told Mr. Nadler's aides that that was the case. Now, we have a debate here today on whether to put the F back into the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The F means ``foreign.'' That is why the amendment should be adopted, or, if it fails, then the underlying bill should be defeated.…”