Economic Stimulus Package

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, when I returned after the Christmas recess, along with all my colleagues, it was with high hopes that we would be able to work together to solve America's problems in a bipartisan way. There were some promising indications that would indeed be possible when the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the Republican leader in the House and the President of the United States came together to deal with one of the emerging crises in our country, which is the economic downturn caused by the subprime lending crisis and a downturn in the housing markets.

Unfortunately, we have begun to see that bipartisan cooperation fraying and some downright foot-dragging that causes me a lot of concern. I can't help but think if I am concerned, there are a lot of other people, not only in this body but across the country, who are concerned by the contradiction between what Members of Congress sometimes say and what actually happens. Sometimes we can get caught up in the Senate rules regarding cloture and how the amendment process works, and that is the kind of thing Senators and our staff like and we live with. Frankly, the one thing the American people can sense from a hundred miles off is hypocrisy--saying one thing and then doing another.

I heard it suggested one time that the opposite of the definition of progress must be Congress. It sounds to me like something Mark Twain or Will Rogers might say, to say that Congress is the opposite of progress. But we have had two examples of important legislation we should be acting upon in a timely way that have been dragged down by inexplicable delay, and I think it is important that we focus on that.

We have heard from the Republican leader this morning regarding his concerns that the bipartisan stimulus package, which, as Speaker Pelosi said, needed to be targeted, timely, and temporary, has now gotten bogged down in an attempt to add additional spending on that bill in a way that invites additional amendments on the floor of the Senate. That means further delay. Add to that a conference committee, which will then delay it even further, and that means the American people, who were expecting rebate checks on their taxes, will have to wait longer, and the chances that this stimulus will in fact be effective in helping to avert a recession makes it much less likely that it will have any impact whatsoever. So delay is costly in terms of our chances for having a positive impact on averting this recession.

FISA

Another area I want to talk about briefly has to do with our national security and our ability to listen to al-Qaida terrorists talk to each other either on the telephone or by e-mail or text messages. Last week, we spent an entire 3 days basically doing nothing while we tried to get the FISA reauthorization bill--the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act bill--passed on a bipartisan basis. Now you would think this is something we ought to be able to come together on in a bipartisan way. The bill that came out of the Intelligence Committee passed by a bipartisan vote of 13 to 2. But then it comes to the floor of the Senate and it becomes locked down in attempts to block this bipartisan legislation.

There has been the suggestion that we haven't had enough time to consider this legislation. Well, I think it is worth noting, as this chart does, the history of this important legislation.

You will remember that it was April of 2007 that the Director of National Intelligence suggested we needed significant reforms in our ability to listen in to conversations between terrorists overseas who were determined and committed to trying to kill innocent Americans and our allies. So the Director of National Intelligence last April said we need an update in this important law to make sure we aren't deaf to the threat or blind to the threat in a way that will endanger American lives.

In May of 2007, there was a significant decision made by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court which suggested that phone calls between two foreign nationals, circuited through the United States, had to get an order through a lengthy application process in order to listen in. The Director of National Intelligence suggested to us that we were missing as much as two-thirds of the actionable intelligence necessary to listen in to our enemies in order to detect, deter, and hopefully prevent terrorist attacks on our soil and against our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In July of 2007, the Director of National Intelligence briefed Congress on the urgent need to update this law in light of these gaps. To its credit, the Senate did get together on a bipartisan basis, at least for a while, in August of 2007 to pass a 6-month piece of legislation. Why it was 6 months, I don't know. It should have been permanent. That legislation was the Protect America Act, which would have expired February 1 but for a 2-week extension that was recently agreed to. So the Senate can get its act together and do what it knows we have to do to protect American lives and to keep our Nation secure.

In October of 2007, the Intelligence Committee, as I noted earlier--the committee that is given the responsibility of oversight of our intelligence community and for keeping our intelligence laws up to date--passed a strong bipartisan bill supported by the Director of National Intelligence that would give the intelligence community all the tools consistent with our laws that it needed in order to keep America safe. It passed by 13 to 2--strong bipartisan support.

The Judiciary Committee then, in November of 2007, a committee on which I sit, unfortunately passed an alternative piece of legislation strictly along partisan lines that was designed to be a substitute. In December 2007, we tried to take up this issue because, again, it was going to expire, and we saw that our Democratic friends basically blocked the Intelligence Committee bill in December of 2007.

On January 23, after we returned from the Christmas holidays and the New Year's break, we returned to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act legislation with the knowledge, as I said, that it was going to expire by February 1 if we didn't act. Well, frankly, because of the meltdown here in the Senate and our inability to pass basic legislation that is necessary to keep America safe, because of the gamesmanship that is going on, we had to pass a temporary extension which is now set to expire February 15.

I don't understand why it is that the Senate seems to be incapable of getting its business taken care of. When we come back with such high hopes that we are going to see a change in attitude and that we will be working together in a bipartisan way to solve the problems that confront our country--whether it is our economy or national

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