Floor Statement Of Senator Patrick Leahy
On The Introduction Of Legislation To Extend
The Expiring Patriot Act
Senate Floor
December 13, 2005

Mr. LEAHY.  Mr. President, first, if I might, I wish to compliment my colleague and neighbor from across the Connecticut River, Senator Sununu of New Hampshire.  He has laid out very clearly and eloquently the reasons we should not be rushed into a bad bill.  It is not because any of us here have any love of terrorists.  Of course none of us do; no Americans do.

On a September morning 4 years ago, nearly 3,000 lives, American lives, were lost - not in a foreign nation but on our own soil.  Our lives as Americans changed in an instant.  There is not a person within this Chamber who does not remember exactly where he or she was when they heard the news of the attacks of 9/11.  In the aftermath of those attacks, Congress moved swiftly to pass antiterrorism legislation.  We moved as a Congress, as a Senate, as a House - not as Republicans or as Democrats, but as Americans, united in our efforts.  The fires were still smoldering at Ground Zero in New York City when the USA PATRIOT Act became law on October 30, 2001, just 6 weeks after the attacks.

I know how hard we worked.  I was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time.  Many of us here in the Senate today worked together in that spirit of bipartisan unity.  We resolved to craft a bill that would make us safer as a nation.

Freedom and security are always in tension in our society, especially so in those somber weeks after the attacks.  We tried our best to strike the right balance between freedom and security.

The Senator from New Hampshire quoted Benjamin Franklin.  As one reads the history of the founding of this Nation and what the Founders went through, his quote stands out so much.

Benjamin Franklin, like the other Founders, knew that had our new country not worked, had the Revolution not worked, most of them would have been hanged for trying to break away from our mother country.  When he spoke of a people who would give up their liberties for security deserving neither, he knew of what he spoke.  And he set a key idea for the fledgling democracy of America, and it is one that I like to think through the generations we have strengthened.  During my years in the Senate, I have done everything possible to strengthen that balance to maintain our liberties because if we do not maintain our liberties, at the best we have a false security.  It is not a real security.

One of the fruits of the bipartisanship of the PATRIOT Act, in trying to work out this balance, was the sunset provisions.  Those key provisions set an expiration date of December 31, 2005, on certain Government powers that had great potential to affect the civil liberties of the American people.  We are just weeks away from that date now.

Some may wonder how these sunset provisions worked their way into the PATRIOT Act.  They were put there by the Republican leader of the House, Dick Armey of Texas, and myself.  We have entirely different political philosophies, but we agreed on one thing:  If you are giving great powers to our Government, you want to make sure there are some strings attached.  It makes no difference whether it is a Republican administration or a Democratic administration, you want to make sure there are strings attached.  Leader Armey and I insisted on these sunsets to ensure that Congress would revisit the PATRIOT Act within a few years and consider refinements to protect the rights and liberties of all Americans more effectively, and we prevailed on that point.

Sadly, the administration and some in the leadership in the House and Senate have squandered key opportunities to improve the PATRIOT Act.  The House-Senate conference report filed last week by Republican lawmakers falls short of what the American people expect and deserve from us.  The bipartisan Senate bill, which the Senate Judiciary Committee and then the Senate adopted unanimously, struck a better balance.

If I might, I wish to compliment the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Arlen Specter, the senior Senator from Pennsylvania, and those Republicans and Democrats in this body who worked with him, as I did, to put together a fair and balanced bill which was able to go through our committee, which is sometimes heavily divided on issues. Instead, it went through the Judiciary Committee unanimously and passed the Senate unanimously.  We worked together on that because we understand that the reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act has to have the confidence of the American people.

Think for a moment.  Governments can limit the rights of the people in their countries really in only two ways:  they can do it by force of arms, by oppression and repression, as we have seen with totalitarian governments, or, if they have done it right, they can do it with the consent of the governed.

As we are limiting some of these rights, as we are giving greater powers to our Government, we want to do it in a way where the American people - all of the nearly 300 million people in this great country - would have confidence in what we have done, because we do not enforce our laws in this country by force of arms, by dictatorship; we do it with the consent of the governed.

I believe what we passed in the Senate and in the Senate Judiciary Committee would have the confidence of the American people.  But now we have pushed forward and changed that to flawed legislation which will not have that confidence and respect of the American people.  The Congress should not rush ahead to enact flawed legislation to meet a deadline that is within our power to extend.  We owe it to the American people to get this right.  America can do better than this flawed legislation.

The way forward to a sensible, workable, bipartisan bill is clear.  It is very clear, as Senator Sununu said on the floor earlier this morning and as I have suggested.

Yesterday, Senator Sununu and I introduced a bill to extend the sunset for the expiring PATRIOT Act powers until March 31, 2006.  Give us until March 31 to get this right, give us until March 31 to have a bill that would have not only the respect of the American people but especially the confidence of the American people.  Our laws work if we have confidence in them, and they fail if we do not have confidence in them. 

In offering this bill, Senator Sununu and I have been joined by Senators Craig, Rockefeller, Murkowski, Kennedy, Hagel, Levin, Durbin, Stabenow, Salazar, and others.  It is a bipartisan effort to extend this deadline.  A deadline which

Congress imposed to ensure oversight and accountability should not now become a barrier to achieving bipartisan compromise and the best bill we can forge together.

This is a vital debate.  It should be.  These are vital issues to all Americans.  If a brief extension is needed to produce a better bill that would better serve all of our citizen then by all means, let us give ourselves that time.

We want to give tools to prosecutors.  I spent 8 years of my life as a prosecutor.  Some of the finest people on my staff are former prosecutors.  We know the needs, especially in the electronic age.  But we can do better, and America can do better if given the time.

I thank Senator Sununu and all of our cosponsors in coming together in a bipartisan way to advance what is a commonsense solution.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record some recent editorials on this matter.

# # # # #