FISA

Floor Speech

FISA -- (Senate - January 29, 2008)

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. DURBIN. Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. BOND. Of course.

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, is the Senator proposing to change the Senate rules that all amendments will now take 60 votes? Is that the proposal before the Senate?

Mr. BOND. Mr. President, if I may respond, as my friend from Georgia pointed out, in order to pass very important legislation such as this, it has been the practice in this body to require 60 votes, and as my colleague from Georgia just said, the farm bill passed with 60 votes on the amendments. When we passed the Protect America Act, we had to get 60 votes.

This bill could be enacted into law and will undoubtedly have to have 60 votes to be signed by the President. I say to my distinguished colleague from Illinois, if there are changes made with less than a 60-vote margin, if they destroy the ability of the intelligence community to operate the collection system as we have prescribed, then that bill will never be signed into law. We would have to start all over again, and we would thus be leaving our intelligence community without the tools to protect us.

We are not saying we are changing the rules of procedure. We are following the practice that has been adopted in this Senate.

Mr. DURBIN. If the Senator will further yield, I am new here; I have only been here 11 years. So I am trying to learn a little about how this works. I recall that somehow the Republic survived and the Nation did well, we kept our armies in the field and built our highways and passed our bills, and we did that for a long period of time without requiring 60 votes on every amendment. Then there came this age of the filibuster, where the Republican minority last year had 62 filibusters, breaking a record in the Senate. Well, to stop the filibuster, you need 60 votes.

So now I assume what the Senator is suggesting is that we are in a new age in the Senate, and it is going to take 60 votes for everything. If that is the proposal, I suggest a rules change. Let's get on with it and find out if there are enough votes here to make that the rule. If it is going to be the age of filibusters again this year, the public won't like it much. We were in the minority not that long ago.

But if that is your goal, if you want to make this a 60-vote requirement, it is a different Senate, and it will be, unfortunately, adding to the frustration many people have when they look at Washington and say: Why don't you pass something, or why don't you do something about health care or about other issues? We will have to tell them we don't have 60 votes.

Mr. BOND. Mr. President, if that was a question--and I assume it was a question--let me say that requiring 60 votes is something which has occurred frequently in previous years, when this side had the majority and the other side was in the minority. We found that it was very difficult to pass legislation without 60 votes. Thus, we have seen that practice before.

But this is not an ordinary piece of legislation. Had we dealt with this in a timely fashion, this could have been handled on a different basis. But the Director of National Intelligence, whom I will refer to as the DNI, submitted to the Intelligence Committee, in April, a measure that he felt was necessary to modernize FISA. That bill was not brought up. The DNI testified in person before the committee in open hearing in May. Despite my request, no legislation was developed in the committee. The DNI came before the Senate in closed session, in a confidential room, in July of this year, to say how important it was. No bill came out of the Intelligence Committee. So the DNI proposed a short-term fix, which I brought to the floor on his behalf at the end of July, the first of August, and we were able to pass the bill, but we had to pass on a 60-vote basis.

When there are very important pieces of legislation, with strong feelings on both sides--as my colleague from Georgia has pointed out, he handled a very important and difficult farm bill--those measures had to have 60 votes.

Now, the fact is, we could have a bunch of simple majority votes, and there are many we can take on a simple majority. But if there are amendments which, if adopted, would prevent the bill from being passed and signed into law, as a practical matter, it makes sense to have a 60-vote margin.

We are waiting for a response to the offers we have made to the other side because, frankly, February 1 is coming. I hope we will agree on it. I understand the House is sending us a 15-day extension. I say to my friend from Illinois that I hope we can adopt the 15-day extension and a collaborative agreement between the two sides on how we are going to proceed to finish this bill.

I see the distinguished assistant majority leader has some information. I am happy to yield to him for that.

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