Usa Freedom Reauthorization Act of 2020

Floor Speech

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Mr. HIMES. Madam Speaker, I thank and compliment the chairman and the ranking member--and the chairman and ranking member of the Committee on the Judiciary--for doing such good and bipartisan work at this rather tense and polarized time around reauthorizing a number of authorities that have been, not just important, but essential to keeping the American public safe.

And they did that, of course, mindful of the need to balance those authorities and those activities with the very legitimate civil liberties interests that we all have, and with our obligation to the Constitution, which we all swear an oath to support and defend.

Madam Speaker, as the chairman said, this bill will reauthorize, even as it imposes additional oversight, a couple of very important authorities, while ending the authority that I think in the last several years was most problematic to me, to many people in this Chamber, and to the American people, which was the bulk collection of telephone metadata.

That was a debate that led to the original USA FREEDOM Act of 2015, to those reforms, and gets us to where we are today where Americans can know that the NSA, a foreign intelligence agency, will not be collecting their records, their metadata. And I believe that that is a very substantial achievement in today's bill.

I would like to take a moment, though, to wrestle with a charge that was leveled by my friends and colleagues on the progressive side, and their recommendation with respect to this bill. Their statement called these authorities ``sweeping unconstitutional surveillance.'' And, with respect, I would say that none of that is true.

Sweeping. Let's talk about sweeping for a second. I guess we could argue about exactly what that means, but of the authorities that are being discussed, we are ending the metadata program. The lone-wolf authority, which allows us to surveil a potential terrorist who is not affiliated with a designated terrorist group, has never been used. That leaves, of course, the roving wiretap authority, which is used in a pointed and careful way and has been used to save lives and prosecute terrorists. That is not, I would suggest with respect, sweeping.

So constitutional, the charge that this is unconstitutional is something that we should examine and take seriously. In this time of overheated rhetoric, I think it is important that we be very clear and very specific in the words that we use. So let me just say about the charge that there is anything unconstitutional in these authorities:

No provision has ever been held to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, by the FISA court itself, or by any other court.

And it is not just the courts, these authorities have been subject to review by the President's Civil Liberties Oversight Board, and they have not deemed any of these authorities unconstitutional.

They have been subject to Congressional scrutiny and, of course, most famously and most recently, subject to review by the Inspector General, who--yes--discovered very significant deficiencies in the way a FISA application dealing with an American citizen was dealt with.

My friends who are concerned about the possibility of the unconstitutional activity should remember, not a single authority has ever been deemed to be unconstitutional. And over and over again, the FISA court, and most recently Inspector General Horowitz, has pushed back hard on misbehavior, on negligence in this area.

So what we are left with here is balance. And as the chairman and as the ranking member have said, the reforms that are made in this bill with respect to empowering an amicus, with respect to giving the President's Civil Liberties Oversight Board additional authorities strike that balance.

Madam Speaker, I close by urging my colleagues to accept that we have made a lot of progress, that this was all about preserving civil liberties, and to vote in favor of H.R. 6172, the USA FREEDOM Reauthorization Act of 2020.

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