The FISA Amendments Act of 2008

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Mr. Cornyn: Mr. President, when I came to Washington about 5 years ago, a colleague of mine said: Welcome to Washington, DC. It is about 8 square miles of logic-free environment, where perception is reality.

I always chuckled when he would say that, and I have repeated it myself a few times to audiences back home in Texas because I think it, unfortunately, has a grain of truth to it. One reason I think people chuckle at that, and maybe groan a little bit inside when Washington is described that way, is because we send out such contradictory messages at the same time.

The Speaker of the House of Representatives and the Republican leader, Mr. Boehner, and the President of the United States have come together and said: We have come up with a bipartisan package to stimulate our economy; to make sure, if it is possible, that we avoid a recession that puts many Americans out of work and hurts them in an economic and personal way.

That was a very welcome message that I heard and the public heard, and I think it was a hopeful one. I, for one, hoped it would signal some kind of new period of cooperation in light of the fact that, frankly, what we had been doing was not working very well, as evidenced by one of the historic lows in congressional approval ratings as a result of the dysfunction in the Senate, and Congress as a whole, last year.

By that I mean you will recall we didn't pass but 1 of the 12 appropriations bills on a timely basis by the end of the fiscal year last year, so we had to roll everything into a big Omnibus appropriations bill. Some say "ominous" appropriations bill, and I think that is an apt description. It was chock full of earmarks and things that people hadn't had adequate time to scrutinize, much less to debate and shine the sunlight of public scrutiny on. So I would hope we would learn from the dysfunction of last year and we would look to the example of bipartisan cooperation as evidenced by the House of Representatives and the White House on the economic stimulus.

Of course, it wasn't limited just to appropriations last year. We saw basically a standstill, after 36 votes on Iraq, on nonbinding resolutions calling for unilateral withdrawal. Finally, we passed, at the very end of last year, a $70 billion emergency appropriations so that our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq would get the support we owe them as a moral obligation, as a sign of our commitment to support the troops, to protect our national security interests. But it took us a long time and a lot of hot air to finally get there.

Then, of course, there was the alternative minimum tax, which, true to form, people said: Well, let's tax the rich. Originally, it was designed to tax 155 taxpayers. Last year, it affected 6 million people. And if we hadn't acted, which we finally did at the end of last year, it would have affected 23 million middle American taxpayers. Thank goodness we were finally able to get the work done, that was our responsibility, but not, frankly, in good form last year.

So it is with some hope that we find ourselves learning from that experience last year and the low approval ratings that they brought. My hope was this early sign of bipartisan cooperation on the economic stimulus package would sort of start a new trend. Unfortunately, on a matter that really is fundamental to our responsibility--I think our first responsibility: to keep America and Americans safe--we find ourselves falling back into the old bad habits of dysfunction once again.

What I mean by that is, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is vital to our national security. It is vital that we continue to be able to listen to foreign terrorists who are communicating with each other, plotting and planning future terrorist attacks on our homeland and on our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and around the world. Rather than pass legislation that would address that, we passed a patch in October for 6 months, which expired in December. So we passed another 1-month extension. And now we find ourselves with our backs up against the wall with this Protect America Act extension expiring February 1. And I was discouraged to hear the majority leader say this morning that it was impossible to pass a reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

What he suggested is that we need another patch for 1 month, or a short period of time, without addressing the primary issues that need to be voted on. The Senator from Florida, Mr. Martinez, talked about the civil liability immunity for the telecoms that may have cooperated with the United States Government at the highest levels based on a request from the President of the United States, the Commander in Chief, during a time of war, and the certification by the Attorney General that what they were being asked to do was legal and, in fact, necessary for us to protect ourselves against another attack, such as the one we suffered in Washington and in New York on September 11, 2001.

We know if this law expires without our addressing all aspects of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, our intelligence officials will be literally blind and deaf to the important intelligence that will allow us to detect and deter future attacks against American citizens. In fact, last summer the Director of National Intelligence told us we were missing about two-thirds of the communications between foreign terrorists that were necessary to protect our country. That is why we passed the Protect America Act. So why in the world we would get bogged down in the same sort of bickering and partisan divide rather than come together to solve this in a bipartisan fashion, frankly, escapes me.

As was pointed out earlier, this very same legislation passed in the Intelligence Committee by a vote of 13 to 2. That is a bipartisan supermajority, sponsored by the chairman, the Democrat, Senator Rockefeller, and the vice chairman, Senator Bond, a Republican. So with that kind of bipartisan support for a product that the Director of National Intelligence and the leadership of our defense community tell us they need in order to continue to protect America against attacks, why is it impossible for us to pass this legislation? I don't know of any other explanation than just downright stubbornness. And, frankly, it is the kind that represents a sort of reminder of the bad habits of the past that I had hoped we would have learned from and change.

Frankly, if the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome, what is happening on FISA is insane because we are resorting to the same old bad habits and not reaching out and solving this problem, which is very real and very urgent.

Let me say a word about the economy. I mentioned the economic stimulus package that was negotiated between the Democrat Speaker of the House and the Republican leader and the representative of the President, Secretary Paulson. I find myself in agreement with the remarks made earlier by Mr. Alexander, the Senator from Tennessee. While there are parts of that agreement that I, frankly, don't like all that much, given the nature of the legislative process, I think it represents a compromise. And looking at some of the proposals coming out of the Senate, to add additional costly programs to grow the size of Government, which invariably will either raise taxes or will send the IOU down to our children and grandchildren to pay by way of expanding the deficit, I am beginning to think the bipartisan package out of the House of Representatives represents a better alternative than I have seen so far discussed here in the Senate.

The last thing we should be doing is using this national challenge to our economy--a great risk of seeing people put out of work and seeing them suffer economically--and taking chances on growing the size of Government or raising taxes or passing the debt down to our children by growing the size of Government and expanding the size of this package in order to satisfy an individual or group of Senators' desire to add pet projects on to that stimulus package. So I hope we will act in a bipartisan fashion to support the House-negotiated legislation, a bipartisan package, just like the Intelligence Committee product is a bipartisan package, and just like we acted at the end of last year, after a lot of dilly-dallying and a lot of delay, to finally pass, in a bipartisan way, legislation that appropriated emergency funding for our troops, that protected middle-class taxpayers from a tax they were never intended to pay in the first place--the alternative minimum tax-- and the other business that we finally did after so many months of delay at the end of last year.

My hope, Mr. President, is that we will not punish those who cooperate with the United States Government in a time of war to help us listen to the conversations of foreign terrorists by refusing to pass this important piece of legislation because it sends the wrong message that if you don't cooperate, you can basically make America blind and deaf to our enemies. That is a danger to all of us.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

The Acting President pro tempore: The Senator from North Dakota.