Walberg Op-Ed in Jackson Citizen Patriot on FISA

Op-Ed

The Preamble to the Constitution provides a list of the primary responsibilities of Congress. Chief among these is the responsibility to "provide for the common defense."

I take very seriously my constitutional duty to uphold the safety of our great nation, so you can understand my disappointment with recent actions by politicians on Capitol Hill.

Faced with a Feb. 17 deadline to update and extend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) permanently, Congress instead wasted time investigating steroids in baseball, requesting football coach Bill Belichick's practice tapes and updating the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act. All of this while failing to pass a FISA bill allowing our intelligence agencies to track terrorists.

Our military and intelligence officials need the tools to protect American citizens from terrorist threats. American military and intelligence officials need to be able to monitor, without delay, calls of suspected and known foreign terrorists in foreign countries. We must not prevent our intelligence community from being able to monitor Osama bin Laden's phone calls.

Congress passed FISA during the Cold War era, and the legislation enabled our intelligence community, with appropriate congressional and judicial oversight, to perform surveillance and protect our national security. However, this was before e-mail, Internet phone calls and satellite phones.

A six-month update of the legislation, modified to address today's world of instantaneous communication, passed Congress in 2007. This update expired this month, and our intelligence community is back to using pre-9/11 gathering tools.

Glenn Sulmasy, a Harvard University national security expert, said updated FISA legislation "has allowed the United States to close a significant intelligence gap by enabling intelligence professionals to collect, without a court order, foreign intelligence on targets located overseas."

A permanent modernization of this legislation would give the American intelligence community tools and flexibility to respond quickly to terrorist threats. A bipartisan version of the legislation passed the Senate in a 68-29 vote. Instead of passing this legislation, Democratic leadership in the House let the FISA updates expire.

House leadership will not support current FISA legislation because the bill would prevent trial lawyers from suing American telecommunications companies who cooperate with American intelligence agencies' monitoring of foreign terrorist communications. It is shameful that some in Washington place the ability of trial lawyers to sue over national security. When American companies assist American intelligence agencies with monitoring foreign terrorist threats, they should be thanked, not sued.

We need the foreign intelligence surveillance law passed so America's intelligence community can monitor al-Qaida and other terrorist networks without getting permission to listen to foreign terrorists plotting on foreign lands.

I have joined with a coalition of House members to introduce the bipartisan FISA bill that passed the Senate. We will work to bring this bill to the floor and fulfill our constitutional duty to protect our nation.

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