Russ Feingold: “Instead of allowing the courts to apply that law to the facts, instead of allowing judges to decide whether the…”

“Instead of allowing the courts to apply that law to the facts, instead of allowing judges to decide whether the companies deserve immunity for acting appropriately, the Intelligence Committee bill sends the message that companies need not worry, they do not have to worry about complying with questionable Government requests in the future, because they will be bailed out. This is outrageous. Even more outrageous is the fact that if these lawsuits are dismissed, the courts may never rule on the NSA wiretapping program. So what this is is an ideal outcome for an administration that believes it should be able to interpret laws on its own without worrying about how Congress wrote them or what a judge thinks. For those of us who believe in three independent and coequal branches of Government, this is a disaster. For all of these reasons, I oppose closure on the motion to proceed to the Intelligence Committee bill. I fear we are about to make the same mistake we made with the PATRIOT Act. We passed that law without taking the time to consider its implications, and we did not do enough during the reauthorization process to fix it. As a result, three Federal courts have struck down provisions of the PATRIOT Act as unconstitutional, and that is right back where we are going to end up if we do not do our jobs now and fix the Protect America Act. I urge my colleagues to vote no on cloture.”