Doing the Senate's Work

Floor Speech

DOING THE SENATE'S WORK -- (Senate - December 04, 2007)

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, the last 2 weeks we have been back in our States visiting with our constituents and reporting to them on the work of the Congress. I did the same. I was in Texas traveling across our State. People would ask me almost everywhere I went what is happening in the Congress, and specifically the Senate. I am sorry to say I had to tell them: Not much is happening. Here we are, 2 months into a new fiscal year and we have yet to pass 11 out of the 12 appropriations bills that literally keep the lights on and instead are working on a continuing resolution, or on auto pilot based on last year's budget and appropriations bills.

I guess I was a little embarrassed to tell them that the approval ratings

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which we have seen on the Rasmussen poll and others, the Gallup poll and others, appears to be well deserved. It is not a partisan matter. It is not that Republicans like what is happening and Democrats do not like what is happening, or vice versa, or independents like what we are doing. The fact is, no one seems to be satisfied. Given the 11 percent or so approval rating, I have to believe that in large part it is due to the fact that we simply have not taken care of our business.

Nowhere in the rest of America could people fail to do as much as we have failed to do in the Senate and survive. Whether it is your family budget or it is the small business, you could not get away with it. Only Congress can get away with it, I guess, to the extent it has, the failures and inaction.

There are two areas particularly I want to talk about in the next few minutes, where this has grave national security implications.

First, as Secretary Gates, the Secretary of the Department of Defense, has told us, if they do not get emergency supplemental funding for our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, they are going to have to begin to give people notices that they are going to run out of money in February. But they have to issue the notices 60 days in advance, which means by December 15 there are going to be lots of folks who are going to be getting pink slips just in time for Christmas because the Senate has failed to act on an emergency supplemental request to fund our troops.

Frankly, I do not think we ought to be in that position. No. 1, it is completely inconsiderate of the families and the individual circumstances of those individuals who are doing their best to support our men and women in uniform.

Secondly, it is completely unnecessary. If we would simply take care of our business and quit playing political games by tying deadlines to the appropriation of emergency funds to support our troops, we could fund our troops and continue to have the debates here in the Congress about what our policy ought to be.

Those debates are important. I respect people with different opinions than mine. But we should not be doing it at the expense of our men and women in uniform or putting in jeopardy the jobs of people in civilian clothes who support our men and women in uniform, by tying the appropriation of this emergency funding to these deadlines to the emergency funding. I hope we will get this done and get it done quickly.

Also, we have, in fact, a middle-class tax increase getting ready to come into full flower with the so-called alternative minimum tax. Unless we act, the 6 million people who currently pay this tax today will grow to 23 million next year. So that is another victim, those taxpayers are another victim of our inaction and failure to act in a responsible way when it comes to getting our work done.

I want to join my colleague from Missouri, the ranking member of the Intelligence Committee, as well as my distinguished colleague from Arizona, and focus a little bit here in the next 5 minutes or so on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

As most Americans who have followed our debates here know, our ability to listen in on conversations between terrorists and to stop further terrorist attacks on our mainland and our homeland, as well as over in Iraq and Afghanistan, depends on a robust intelligence-gathering capability.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was a law passed back in 1978, back in a different era, which served our purpose then and made sure that no intelligence gathering, no wiretaps could occur against Americans. But the fact is that law has needed updating, has been updated from time to time. But we need to make clear that when it comes to monitoring communications between terrorists and foreign nations, it is not necessary to prepare a mound of paperwork and have an army of lawyers process it through a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in order to get a permit to do so.

We have, as we all know, passed a temporary measure which will expire in February. But we need to act on this permanently and not continue to jam all of our business into the last few weeks and put people in doubt, particularly in the intelligence community, of whether they will have the capability to detect and deter future terrorist attacks by employing this capability.

Before we passed a temporary patch, I think, in August--or before we broke for the August recess--because of a ruling by a judge and because of changes in technology, it had been reported in the press that we had lost about two-thirds of our intelligence-gathering capability. Fortunately, we were able to fix that on a temporary basis.

But there are also other important parts of this legislation such as how do we treat the telecommunications carriers that did what they were asked to do in the security interests of the American people and cooperated with the Federal Government? Are we going to provide them the legal protection they are entitled to under the law or are we going to hang them out to dry and make them liable for lawsuits and damages, perhaps, and jeopardize the intelligence that we have gained with their cooperation?

That is the wrong way to treat these telecommunications carriers. We ought to not reward them but at least do our duty with regard to these citizens, corporate and individual alike, who cooperated with the U.S. Government in gathering intelligence and not punish them by hanging them out to dry and making them the subject of numerous lawsuits and litigation.

Just one quick example: When Joseph Anzack was kidnapped by al-Qaida on May 12 while serving in Iraq and killed a few weeks later, you have to wonder if the paperwork that took roughly 10 hours to complete, along with a group of lawyers before an authorization to monitor communications which directly implicated his kidnappers would have saved his life. On that date, May 12, he and Alex Jimenez and Byron Fouty were kidnapped. But a 10-hour delay in getting the FISA paperwork done may have cost Joseph Anzack his life, and may have severely hampered the continuing efforts to find Alex Jimenez and Byron Fouty.

While the Protect America Act that passed in August, as I said, provided a temporary fix to the problem, it will expire in February. I just ask our colleagues on the other side of the aisle, why are we delaying the passage of this important fix to this temporary act? Isn't it important enough to make sure we do everything possible not to hamper our intelligence-gathering capability? We are, in fact, a nation at war, and we ought to act like it. That means arming our intelligence community with the tools they need to detect terrorist communications and to deter future terrorist attacks.

I know 9/11 seems like a long way off in the minds of many, and many have acted as if it never happened, but the fact is, unless we have robust intelligence-gathering capability, and unless the Senate acts promptly to permanently grant the power to our intelligence community to detect these communications, we are at grave risk, and we should not be as a result of Congress's inaction.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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