Ensuring Tax Exempt Organizations the Right to Appeal Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. HEINRICH. Yes. I thank my friend from Kentucky and ask him if he would yield for a question without losing his right to the floor.

I want to start out by prefacing this for a few minutes, from my limited experience--just over the past a little over 2 years, and I am on the Intelligence Committee now--by saying there is simply no question that our Nation's intelligence professionals are incredibly dedicated, patriotic men and women who make real sacrifices to keep our country safe and free and, in that, they should be able to do their job, secure in the knowledge that their agencies have the confidence of the American people.

And Congress--those of us here--needs to preserve the ability of those agencies to collect information that is truly necessary to guard against real threats to our national security.

The Framers of the Constitution, as my colleague from Kentucky knows, declared that government officials had no power--no power--to seize the records of individual Americans without evidence of wrongdoing. And it was so important that they literally enshrined and embedded this principle in the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.

In my view, the bulk collection of Americans' private telephone records by the NSA in this program clearly violates the spirit--if not the letter--of the intentions of the Framers here.

Just 6 months after my first Senate intelligence briefing, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents that exposed the NSA's massive collection of Americans' cell phone and Internet data. And as my friend from Kentucky said, not just a few Americans but literally millions of innocent Americans were caught up in what is effectively a dragnet program.

It was made clear to the public that the government had convinced the FISA Court to accept a sweeping reinterpretation of section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, which ignited, in my view, a very necessary and long overdue public conversation about the trade-offs made by our government between protecting our Nation and respecting our constitutional liberties.

I think well-intentioned leaders had, during the previous decade, come down decidedly on the side of national security with a willingness to sacrifice privacy protections in the process. And what became obvious was that because of our continued lack of knowledge of Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, some within our government believed we still needed to collect every scrap of information available in order to ensure that, should we ever need it, we could query this information and track down U.S.-based threats. In doing so, the government ended up collecting billions of call data records, linked in case after case after case not to terrorists but to innocent Americans.

Wisconsin Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, who I served with in the House of Representatives, who was one of the authors of the original underlying legislation--the PATRIOT Act itself--said a couple of years ago: ``The PATRIOT Act never would have passed ..... had there been any inclination at all that it would have authorized bulk collections.''

As this debate increasingly moved to the public sphere, I joined my colleagues on the Select Committee on Intelligence--Senator Wyden, who was just here on the floor a few minutes ago, and former Senator Mark Udall--in pressing the NSA and the Director of National Intelligence for some clear examples in which the bulk information collected under this metadata program, under section 215, was uniquely responsible for the capture of a terrorist or the thwarting of a terrorist plot. They could not provide any--not a single solitary example--nor could they make a case for why the government had to hold the data itself and why for so long.

Thankfully, a review panel set up by President Obama agreed with us and recommended that the government end its bulk collection of telephone metadata.

I will admit, however--and my friend from Kentucky has brought this up on several occasions already--that I am incredibly disappointed that the President hasn't simply used his existing authority to unilaterally roll back some of the unnecessary blanket metadata collection. Some have claimed this inaction is evidence that the President secretly supports maintaining the current program as is. That, however, is nonsense.

The President has asked Congress to give him additional authorities so that he can carry out the program in an effective manner, and the USA Freedom Act seeks to do just that.

The Republican-led House of Representatives last week passed that bill--the USA Freedom Act--by a vote of 338 to 88, with large majorities from both parties. At a time when everyone believes we agree on nothing, large majorities of Republicans and Democrats supported that piece of legislation.

Further, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that the NSA is violating the law by collecting millions of Americans' phone records is even more proof that we have gone too far and need to recalibrate and, in my view, refocus our efforts. Why on Earth, I would ask, would we extend a law that this court has found to be illegal?

Given the overwhelming evidence that the current bulk collection program is not only unnecessary but also illegal, I think we have reached a critical turning point, and I want to thank my colleague from Kentucky for coming to the floor to force us all to have this conversation. We have kicked the can down the road too many times on this particular issue, and I believe it is time to finally end the bulk collection of these phone records and instead focus more narrowly on the records of actual terrorists.

Americans value their independence. I know this is especially true in my home State of New Mexico. They cherish their right to privacy that is guaranteed by our Constitution. But some of our colleagues still think it is OK for the government to collect and hold millions of private records from innocent citizens and to search those records at will.

The majority leader is asking us to act quickly to reauthorize. I believe it would be a grave mistake to reauthorize the existing PATRIOT Act, and I join my colleagues in blocking any extension of the law that does not include major reforms, including an end to bulk collection.

I think we can and we must balance government's need to keep our Nation safe

with its sacred duty to protect our constitutionally guaranteed liberties. And I guess this brings me to my question for the Senator from Kentucky.

How on Earth can you possibly square what the Fourth Amendment says, in terms of our papers and our ability to control our own effects without a warrant, with the government's bulk collection of phone records of law-abiding American citizens?

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Mr. HEINRICH. Mr. President, I would ask the Senator from Kentucky an additional question. I found it very helpful before I came to the floor today--and I want to thank my colleague again for raising these critical issues--to go back and read the Fourth Amendment, and I thought it would be worthwhile just to briefly read that once again here on the floor because I think it really puts you in the mind of some of the greatest Americans who ever lived.

Our Framers wrote a constitution that has survived for well over 200 years now. It has survived Republicans. It has survived Democrats. It has survived political parties that came and went, and it has survived great conflicts time and again.

The Fourth Amendment says: ``The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.''

I would ask my friend from Kentucky his views on the resilience of this constitutional document and how he can possibly read the actual text of this Fourth Amendment without realizing that those Framers really meant for this to apply into the future to things that we hadn't foreseen yet but using the broadest terminology available, such as words like effects and papers?

I yield the floor and thank the Senator from Kentucky once again. This is one of those issues that unite people on the left and the right, Republicans and Democrats, who care deeply about our national security but also care about our constitutional liberties. I think the time to fix this is upon us. And without shining a light on this, we certainly are not going to be able to make the progress we need. We have an opportunity here, and we should seize it.

I yield the floor to the Senator from Kentucky.

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