Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Obviously, we are working on the CJS appropriations bill, and our deliberation on that has been delayed by a number of the other amendments and other matters that have been voted on this week. But it has always been the intention of the majority leader to allow Senators to offer amendments, unlike, frankly, when Democrats controlled this Chamber. But I do think it is going to require some cooperation and maybe even some consent agreements to agree to amendments that can be resolved in time to meet the July 1 deadline. To me, one of the best arguments in favor of this legislation is that we want to avoid a taxpayer bailout. We want to avoid a taxpayer bailout. This legislation from the House does that. I understand the Senator may have some objections to it and some better ideas in his mind, but we are going to have that opportunity next week.

If we want to see what the effect of leftwing fiscal policy is, what we see is the bankruptcy occurring in Puerto Rico now. I think they need to try something else, some fiscal responsibility and restraint. Frankly, I worry for the rest of the country that if we don't do something to get our own fiscal house in order here in the United States Senate, the rest of the country is going to find itself in dire straits at some point in the not too distant future.

So I would say that we are going to have a chance to have that debate and those votes next week. This is not the time to do it because we have other important work that is pending before the Senate. Nor are the rest of us 99 Senators going to agree to a unanimous consent request to legislation we haven't even read or had time to consider.

So under those circumstances, I would be compelled to object.

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, tomorrow we will have a chance to begin to talk about the real cause of what happened that horrible night in Orlando at the Pulse nightclub--that is a homegrown terrorist attack inspired by the poisonous ideology of ISIS, the Islamic State. We will have a chance to revisit the total lack of any coherent plan coming out of the White House to deal with the threat of the Islamic State over in the Middle East and the consequences of failing to deal with that here at home.

The poisonous fruit of that failure and previous ones is already self-evident: the massacre of American soldiers at Fort Hood, TX, in 2009 that took the lives of 13 people and an unborn child; a deadly attack on 2 military facilities in Chattanooga, TN, in 2015 that took the lives of 5 U.S. servicemembers; an attempted attack in Garland, TX, about a year ago that--but for a vigilant police officer was thwarted-- could have been disastrous; and then, of course, the shooting in San Bernardino where 14 people were killed. Add to that poisonous fruit of the failure to have a coherent policy to deal with the Islamic State and its poison, the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, where 3 persons were killed and many more wounded--not by a gun but by pressure cooker bombs made by the terrorists. Most recently, the worst terrorist attack in our country since 9/11 was in Orlando, where a jihadist pledged his allegiance to ISIS and then viciously gunned down 49 people in that Orlando nightclub.

It is telling that the Attorney General sought to withhold from the American people the 911 calls of the Orlando shooter to excise out--to rewrite history--and to diminish the terrorist influences that motivated him in the first place. It is further evidence that the Obama administration fails to see what is plainly right in front of its face when it comes to the threat, and it continues to refuse to deal with it in a way that would crush ISIS and discourage people from becoming radicalized because they feel like ISIS is winning. If ISIS were crushed and destroyed, which should be our goal, I don't believe we would have radicalized Americans here pledging allegiance to the leader of a crushed or destroyed Islamic State.

So jihadi terrorism on American soil is not just some one-off, freak occurrence. It is now an undeniable pattern. How many ISIS-inspired attacks do we need in this country before we start talking about and taking the threat seriously and begin targeting the evil ideology ISIS is selling?

Typically, in an investigation, law enforcement has to work hours on end to answer the question of who did it. But that is not the case with these examples of Islamic extremism. We know who the enemy is. But the Obama administration has failed to call it for what it is, and the President has failed to offer any strategy to root out and exterminate it. Promises to ``defeat and degrade'' appear just about as hollow as the President's threat of retaliatory action if redlines were crossed with the use of chemical weapons in Syria. When that happened, there were no consequences.

So the result is that ISIS isn't contained, and it is surely not retreating. Don't take my word for it. The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency just last week suggested that ISIS would continue to ``intensify its global terror campaign.'' They are not giving up, and they are not going away. They are doubling down. Like the terrorist in Orlando, ISIS is actively using every tool at its disposal to recruit, train, and radicalize individuals here in America and in other parts of the world.

This terrorist army figured out a long time ago that it could accomplish its objectives of inflicting death and destruction on innocent Americans without even having to send its operatives from the Middle East into the United States. All it had to do was to export, not its soldiers, but its ideology and poisonous ideas to the United States via the Internet with the propaganda that it uses to, again, poison susceptible minds, those who are sympathetic to the cause and willing to swear allegiance to it and carry out the horrific acts like we saw in Orlando.

Over the weekend, the House Homeland Security Committee chairman noted that ISIS and its supporters are posting an estimated 200,000 tweets a day--200,000 separate messages a day on Twitter. How long will it take before the administration recognizes that this propaganda poses a growing national security problem? Once they acknowledge it, how much longer will it take them before they do something about it?

In fact, we heard from FBI Director Comey that there are open investigations on individuals suspected of being radicalized in all 50 States. I don't see the administration doing anything at all to effectively counter this terrorist propaganda popping up all over the Internet, turning some susceptible Americans into cold-blooded jihadist killers. We can fight back by equipping our law enforcement personnel with the tools they need to keep us safe. The fact is, you can't connect the dots unless you can collect the dots, and that means robust intelligence consistent with our Constitution, including the Fourth Amendment.

Too often law enforcement officials have to operate with one hand over their eye or one hand behind their back, however you want to characterize it, because they can't access key information in a timely manner, and because of that they are not able to discern the pendency of an attack or the motivations of somebody who is planning an attack. If they could collect the information, maybe--just maybe--they could then go to the FISA Court and get a search warrant. Maybe--just maybe-- they could get a wiretap upon the showing of probable cause in court. Those, of course, are consistent with the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, and the burden should be on law enforcement to produce probable cause evidence in order to justify collection of the content of those communications.

We saw the consequences of our flying blind in Garland, TX, just last year. On the morning of the attempted terrorist attack, the two men who came from Phoenix dressed in body armor with semiautomatic weapons sent more than 100 messages overseas to suspected terrorists, and vice versa, but, unfortunately, FBI Director Comey--at least the last time he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee--said the FBI still doesn't have access to that information because of encryption. This means our law enforcement authorities could be missing critical information that could uncover future terrorist attacks or identify the network of terrorists here so we can stop them before they kill again.

The Garland case isn't unique. The FBI is regularly slowed down by outdated policies that make their job of protecting the homeland much more difficult--more difficult than it needs to be. We saw that in San Bernardino too. We have to address this gaping hole in our legal authorities and do all we can to give the FBI and our other law enforcement officials the tools they need, and a good place to start would be tomorrow morning by allowing the FBI to use national security letters to obtain key information about what suspected terrorists are doing on the Internet and whom they are communicating with online in counterterrorism investigations. This is not for content, as the Presiding Officer knows. This is information about Internet and email addresses, much as national security letters are currently authorized to collect telephone numbers and financial information. In fact, the FBI Director said the omission of this authority years ago, he believes, was an oversight, but it now provides a gaping vulnerability and has blinded the FBI to information that could well allow them to have detected the intentions earlier of jihadists like the one in Orlando.

I don't know for a fact, but I just wonder if the FBI, back when they were vetting the Orlando shooter on two separate occasions because things he said and did put him on the watch list, if they would have been notified immediately when he purchased his firearms. Well, as we now know, the FBI investigations were inconclusive and he was taken off the watch list. I wonder if the FBI had access to a national security letter that would allow them to gain information about the IP addresses he had been visiting from his Internet service provider, along with email addresses--again, not content because you can't do that without a warrant issued by the FISA Court and a showing of probable cause--and what he might have been viewing, such as YouTube videos of Anwar al- Awlaki, who was responsible for radicalizing MAJ Nidal Hasan at Fort Hood and others, and the information was sufficient enough that the President of the United States authorized the use of a drone in order to kill him on the battlefield so he could not kill other innocent Americans--well, you get my point. We need to make sure the FBI has access to all the information they can legally get their hands on, and a good place to start is voting on the McCain-Burr amendment tomorrow so the FBI can obtain information about what they are doing on the Internet and who they are communicating with, and if it is justified, to be able to then go to court and demonstrate probable cause sufficient to actually then look at content in order to prevent terrorist attacks.

I want to be clear about one thing. The FBI already has the power to review financial records like Western Union transfers and the FBI already has the power to review telephone records. They can access telephone numbers, not the content of the conversation, again, unless there is further authority issued by a court of law, but because of an inadvertent omission in the law, the FBI can't readily access the exact kind of information ISIS is using to recruit and radicalize violent extremists lurking in our midst.

We have seen how difficult it is to identify these people before they kill. Why in the world wouldn't we want to make sure we provide all the information under our constitutional laws that could be available to law enforcement to identify these people before they kill?

I introduced a similar proposal to the McCain-Burr amendment a few weeks ago in the Judiciary Committee that would address this and provide access to this counterterrorism information. I am glad our colleagues, the senior Senators from Arizona and North Carolina, have now offered this amendment to the underlying legislation.

As the Presiding Officer knows, this provision, or one very similar to it, was contained in the Intelligence reauthorization bill that had the bipartisan support of everybody on the Intelligence Committee, save one.

This is long overdue. It is bipartisan, and I think our failure to act to grant this authority, particularly in the wake of this terrible tragedy in Orlando, would be inexcusable. This is something the FBI Director, appointed by President Obama, has said he needs. He said this is their No. 1 legislative priority. President Obama's administration-- beyond just the FBI Director--supports it. What is stopping us from providing this authority?

The truth is, these threats are at our doorstep. ISIS is using every tool it has to spread fear and chaos, and we owe it to those on the frontlines of our counterterrorism efforts to get them what they need in order to more effectively counter these terrorists' efforts. It is our duty to do something about it. Unlike some of the provisions we voted on last night that would do nothing to stop people like the Orlando shooter, this could actually stop them.

I am all ears if there are other ideas when it comes to advancing commonsense proposals to fight terrorism at home and make our communities safer, but this is a good place to start. I hope going forward we can do a better job of providing the FBI and law enforcement officials the resources they need to keep us safe. This is within our grasp, and all we need to do is to take advantage of this opportunity and have a strong bipartisan vote to adopt the McCain-Burr amendment tomorrow morning.

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