Ensuring Tax Exempt Organizations the Right to Appeal Act- Continued

Floor Speech

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Mr. LEE. Madam President, free trade is of absolute importance in this country. We need free trade. I like free trade. I want trade to be as free as it possibly can be. It is not, however, as pressing as another matter that we should be considering now.

Certain provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act will expire a week from Sunday at midnight. This is an important issue, and it is one that deserves debate and full consideration within the Senate.

I want to point out that we have had months and months to plan for this deadline--years, in fact. During these last several months, we have worked with House Members, members of the law enforcement community, and members of the intelligence community to create a compromise bill that now enjoys the support of the Attorney General of the United States, of the Director of National Intelligence, the telecom industry, the NRA, the tech community privacy groups, and 338 Members of the House of Representatives. This is a supermajority--a super-duper majority.

We have had a week since the House passed this bill, and it is time that we take it up in earnest and give it the full attention and consideration of the Senate that it deserves. Then we can return to TPA and finish it without facing expiration of a key national security tool without anything to put in its place.

This is a bill--the USA FREEDOM Act, as enacted by the House of Representatives--that represents an important compromise, represents a very careful and effective balancing between privacy and security interests, recognizing the fact that our privacy and our security are not in conflict. They are part of the same thing. We are secure in part because our privacy is respected. This bill respects both of those.

We know that it is not easy to get to 218 votes for a lot of things on this issue in the House of Representative. In fact, we know it is impossible to get to 218 votes in the House of Representatives for a clean reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act provisions in question.

We know that a lot of other things would be difficult to impossible to pass in the House. We know that one bill does enjoy a supermajority in the House of Representatives, and that is the USA FREEDOM Act. We should be taking that up now.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate set aside consideration of H.R. 1314, the TPA legislation, and move to the immediate consideration of H.R. 2048, the USA FREEDOM Act, that the motion to proceed be agreed to, and that the bill be open for amendments; further, that upon disposition of H.R. 2048, the Senate resume consideration of H.R. 1314.

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