FISA

Floor Speech

FISA -- (Senate - March 07, 2008)

Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, nearly an entire year has passed since the nonpartisan Director of National Intelligence, ADM Mike McConnell, warned Congress that America's electronic surveillance law was dangerously out of date and in critical need of repair. The old law was causing us to miss substantial amounts of intelligence on terrorist suspects overseas, and it needed to be fixed.

Yet nearly a year later the problem has still not been resolved. For no good reason, the dangers posed by the old law remain. The Senate has done its part to correct the problem. Last month, we passed a broadly bipartisan bill that fixed the outdated FISA law as well as the temporary bill that replaced it in August.

The only thing now standing in the way of intelligence officials having all the tools they need to monitor terrorists is the House Democratic leadership which is blocking the will of its own majority by refusing to vote on the Senate-passed version of the bill.

The House leadership's actions are quite irresponsible. Worse, they are dangerous. When a temporary 6-month revision of the FISA bill expired last month, House leaders said they needed 15 days to deliberate over a new revision that included legal protections for phone companies that stepped forward after 9/11 to help in the hunt for terrorists.

When those 15 days were up, House Democrats said they needed 3 more weeks. Then they left town for a vacation without acting, despite the urgent pleas of the Director of National Intelligence not to leave the bill undone.

Now, 3 weeks after House Democratic leaders said they needed 3 weeks to work out their concerns, they are ready to go on vacation without acting again, this time on a 2-week spring break. The patience of the American people is wearing thin. It is long past time for the Democratic leadership in the House to do its part.

They face a simple choice: Either take up the Senate-passed bipartisan bill that is guaranteed to pass their Chamber and be signed into law or go on another vacation, leaving the intelligence agents without the tools they need and America more vulnerable to terrorist attack.

Some cynics in the House think there is a third option: They want to pass a new bill that sounds acceptable but which they know would not be signed into law. This is a distinction without a difference. Passing a bill that will not become law is no better than passing no bill at all.

Some news reports, quoting senior Democratic aides, have suggested that a stalemate on the surveillance issue is helpful to both sides politically. This should offend anyone who takes America's security seriously. And it is refuted by the 68 Members of the Senate, Democratic and Republican, who voted last month to put the recommendation of the Director of National Intelligence into law.

The Senate's solid bipartisan action followed months of hard work between the two parties on the bill that met three basic criteria: It allowed intelligence professionals to gather information from terrorists overseas, it protected companies that stepped forward in a time of urgent national need to cooperate in the hunt for terrorists, and it was guaranteed to be signed into law by the President.

If the House Democratic leadership acts responsibly, it will follow the same three criteria by sending a good bill to the White House before the end of next week. The most efficient path to success is to take up the Senate-passed bill which a majority of House Members, we already know, support.

The time for action has long since passed. Democrats have had nearly a year to address this problem. Again and again they have asked for extensions, then failed to act once the deadline ran out. They are akin to students who continually put off their homework then ask the teacher for more time, hoping the final deadline will never come.

The acts of the House Democratic leadership make their purpose abundantly clear. If they had their way, an improved surveillance law would never pass in the only manner that is acceptable to the Director of National Intelligence.

It is not too late for the House to do the right thing. They have a full legislative week ahead to allow a simple up-or-down vote on the Senate bill. Our forces fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan will not be leaving their units for spring break. The House should not recess for theirs until they have voted on the Senate's bipartisan FISA reform legislation; to do anything less would be grossly irresponsible.

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