[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 10]
[Senate]
[Pages 14360-14361]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            FISA AMENDMENTS

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, the one point that I would like to make 
before we vote later this morning on the various amendments to the 
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act--a law that is aimed at helping 
us stop terrorists before they can hurt us--is the most important point 
of all. It also happens to be a fairly straightforward one: adopting 
any one of these three amendments would kill the underlying bill.
  It would risk putting us right back where we were last July, with the 
August recess approaching, and the authorizations for monitoring 
foreign terrorist targets set to expire. In that case, if a member of 
al-Qaida were to call, our ability to monitor his communications would 
be seriously handicapped, and it may even be impossible for us to do 
so, at least on a real-time basis.
  So the question before the Senate is really quite simple: we either 
pass this delicately balanced bipartisan bill which gives our 
intelligence officials the tools they need to find foreign terrorists 
overseas--which is itself a compromise on the bill the Senate already 
passed this year by a vote of 68-29, and which will garner a 
Presidential signature--or we scrap it altogether and end up right back 
where we were a year ago.
  That is our choice. Fix the problem now--finally--or allow the 
problem that intelligence officials alerted us to more than a year ago 
continue indefinitely, regardless of the threat.
  Just yesterday the White House reiterated its intention to veto any 
FISA bill that is amended to strip or weaken liability protection for 
the telecommunication companies that may have helped the Government in 
the wake of the September 11 attacks.
  This means that the adoption of any one of these amendments will take 
down the entire bill, unraveling more

[[Page 14361]]

than a year of delicate bipartisan negotiations.
  We're not doing these companies any special favors. The U.S. 
Government wouldn't even have a foreign surveillance program without 
them. The intelligence community relies on their cooperation to do its 
job. And any law that makes it less likely that these companies 
cooperate with us in the future is a law that makes it harder to 
protect Americans from terrorist attacks.
  That is not just my view or the view of Senator Bond on the 
Republican side. Let me remind my colleagues of what the chairman of 
the Intelligence Committee told us, quite bluntly, about our 
responsibilities in this area on the floor of the Senate last February. 
This is what Senator Rockefeller said:

       What people have to understand around here, he said, is 
     that the quality of the intelligence we are going to be 
     receiving is going to be degraded. It is going to be 
     degraded. It is already going to be degraded as 
     telecommunications companies lose interest. Everybody tosses 
     that around and says: Well, what do you mean? I say: Well, 
     what are they making out of this? What is the big payoff for 
     the telephone companies? Do they get paid a lot of money? No. 
     They get paid nothing. What do they get for this? They get 
     $40 billion worth of suits, grief, trashing, but they do it. 
     But they don't have to do it, because they do have 
     shareholders to respond to, to answer to.
       There is going to be a degrading of intelligence in some 
     very crucial areas, because we will go right back to where we 
     were last August, and that will be a further jolt to the 
     telecommunications companies, because they will understand 
     that you cannot count on the Congress, you cannot count on us 
     to make policy which will give [them] stability.

  Those are the words of the Democratic chairman of the Intelligence 
Committee. And I would only add to them that it is our job to make 
policy in this area. The Senate--and especially its Intelligence 
Committee--has been examining this issue for over a year. The committee 
of jurisdiction conducted extensive oversight and concluded that the 
telecommunications companies acted in good faith in answering the 
administration's call to help protect the country from terrorist 
attack.
  The Intelligence Committee then passed an overwhelmingly bipartisan 
bill, 13-2, that protected these companies from potentially crippling 
lawsuits, which would terminate the program. The full Senate made the 
same policy judgment, defeating the Feingold-Dodd amendment to strike 
immunity 67-31, as well as the Specter-Whitehouse substitution 
amendment 68-30, on its way to passing the bill by a lopsided vote of 
68-29.
  Further modifications were made to the bill in negotiations with the 
House, including to the liability provisions. The House leadership--
which had been holding up enactment of a FISA modernization law because 
of the liability question--then voted for this compromise bill, and the 
compromise cleared the House with almost 300 votes.
  Now, after all this legislative time and effort and contemplation, 
the Bingaman amendment would have us say, ``Just kidding.'' This 
amendment would punt our oversight and legislative responsibilities 
over to inspectors general in the executive branch so they can look at 
the same program that the Intelligence Committee and the Congress have 
been considering for over a year.
  It is ironic that those who are concerned about preserving 
congressional prerogatives and congressional responsibilities, 
especially in relation to the executive branch, would have us rely on 
the judgment of employees of the executive branch before we can make 
policy, especially after all the work that Congress has done on this 
subject. We should not kick the can down the road for another 15 months 
and in the process abdicate our role in this area.
  An acceptable bipartisan solution to our intelligence problem has 
already been reached. That solution has been endorsed by majorities in 
both houses of Congress. If that solution is compromised by adopting 
any of these amendments, this bill would not become law, current 
targeting orders would expire, and the Senate would fail today to do 
its basic duty of protecting Americans to the fullest extent possible 
from terrorist attack.
  Americans have a right to expect Congress to give our intelligence 
officials what they need to do their jobs. And the only way we fulfill 
that trust is by voting against each of these amendments to the FISA 
modernization bill.
  Mr. President, before turning to another subject, I wish to 
particularly commend the Senator from Missouri, Mr. Bond, who has done 
an incredibly effective job at trying to traverse the various currents 
that have surrounded this extraordinarily difficult piece of 
legislation.
  First he established a very good working relationship with Senator 
Rockefeller, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee. He was an 
integral part of negotiating and, as I say, kind of dealing with the 
currents that were going on through the last year.
  I just wish to say through the Chair to him how much America owes the 
Senator from Missouri for his extraordinary work on this subject. 
America will be safer in the future as a result of the work of the 
Senator from Missouri. We here in the Senate are deeply grateful for 
his extraordinary job, and the people of Missouri have every right to 
be very proud of him.
  Mr. BOND. I thank the Senator.

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