Mr. Speaker, I yield myself as much time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, this bill is just the latest example of the complete and utter failure of the Democratic leadership in the House to give the…
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself as much time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, this bill is just the latest example of the complete and utter failure of the Democratic leadership in the House to give the intelligence community the tools that it needs to protect the American people and our allies from radical jihadists who have sworn to wage holy war against freedom in order to impose a radical religious tyranny. I urge my colleagues to oppose this override of the President's veto.
My colleagues on the other side of the aisle are finding out how tough it is to pass legislation in the intelligence area. But the lesson they need to learn, this is about national security, and national security issues need to be done on a bipartisan basis, can not be done on a purely partisan basis.
The debate on this authorization bill is not about a single issue, as some would have you believe. It is about the need to ensure that we give the right tools to our intelligence professionals in this time of enhanced threat. What we should be talking about today is improving this bill so that it can have broad bipartisan support.
But we also ought to be talking about FISA, FISA modernization. That is the vote that this House should be considering. That is the tool that our intelligence community has said that they need to keep America safe. That is the tool that, on a broad bipartisan basis, the model for how we should be doing legislation in this area. It's how they did it in the Senate, 68 Senators on a bipartisan basis saying we need to do FISA reform. We need to do it to keep America safe, to keep our homeland safe, to keep our troops safe, to keep our embassies and our personnel overseas safe, and to make sure that we also have the tools in place that so many of our allies rely on to keep them safe.
But no, once again, this House moves in a partisan basis. It's been almost 25 days now that the leadership on the other side of the aisle has refused to even bring up for a vote FISA modernization. Each and every day, our capabilities in this area erode. One of the most important and one of the most successful tools that we have used to keep America safe over the last 7 years is slowly eroding. My colleagues on the other side of the aisle will not even allow it to come up for a vote.
The United States continues to employ tough antiterrorist programs because the radical jihadist threat did not end with 9/11. One only has to listen to the statements by bin Laden, his deputy, Zawahiri, to understand the seriousness of this threat, its global implications, and the determination of radical jihadists to strike the American homeland.
But instead of doing a bipartisan, national security issue, we continue to move down the path of partisan politics. The majority leadership of this House refuses to see or hear the continuing threat from radical jihadists. Even more troubling, the majority refuses to recognize that tough antiterrorist tools employed since 2001 have protected this country from terrorist attacks.
Instead, some have distorted anti-terrorist programs as threats to the American people rather than tools that our intelligence agencies are using to protect us from threats of radical jihadist terrorism. Instead of helping to strengthen anti-terrorist tools, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have established a clear patent of trying to undermine and erode them, undermining and eroding the very type of people that we should be trying to help with this bill, the men and women who risk their lives each and every day in the intelligence community to keep America safe.
There is no better example than the outright refusal of the majority leadership to allow a straight up-or-down vote on bipartisan FISA modernization legislation.
Again, this is a bill that passed the Senate overwhelmingly, clearly supported by a majority of this House. There's ample reason to be concerned about this abuse of the majority's powers. I'm far more concerned at the impact that these actions are continuing to have and the capabilities of our intelligence professionals to protect our country, our people, and our allies from attack.
Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. Speaker, I would like to yield 4 minutes to a member of the committee from Texas (Mr. Thornberry).
At this point in time, I would like to yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Flake).
Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to my colleague from Illinois (Mr. Kirk).
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 3 minutes.
Mr. Chairman, it's interesting that this debate is about something that hasn't been done for 5 years. What we need to be talking about is what we haven't been able to do for the last 30 days.
My colleagues on the other side of the aisle are talking about a technique and a procedure that hasn't been used for 5 years, but they're unwilling to talk about the technique that enables us to identify what terrorists may have planned for the United States.
They don't want to address giving the tools to Americans who work in the intelligence community that have proven to be effective. They're willing to give our playbook to al Qaeda, but at the same time they've taken away our most effective tool, to try to determine exactly what al Qaeda may be up to. It is probably the most glaring deficiency in this bill, but there are many others.
It fails to provide adequate resources for human intelligence. The earmarks we've heard about. It fails to constrain the size of the intelligence bureaucracy. It fails to rationalize how we're going to put the intelligence community together. And then, interestingly enough, it continues the misplaced priorities.
We are unwilling to deal with FISA. We are unwilling to give that tool to our intelligence community, but we feel that it's more than appropriate to tell our intelligence community to go out and conduct a formal assessment of ``national security,'' the national security aspects of global warming.
Our intelligence professionals in the field need to be really wondering what's going on in the House, where they've now watched us for 30 days avoiding dealing with the tough issue that has proven to be so effective in keeping America safe, and at the same time we're arguing here, and the majority is arguing that, forget about surveilling al Qaeda and radical jihadists, take your resources and study national security aspects of global warming, although there's many other agencies that already work on that.
So, shelve FISA. As a matter of fact, don't even talk about FISA. Don't even bring it to the floor. Don't do any work on it. Don't put any proposals out there. Have no bipartisan discussions on where we go with FISA. Leave that on the shelf. Let our capabilities erode. Go out and study global warming.
What are the priorities of this House? How are we going to keep America safe when we, on one hand, handcuff our intelligence community, and on the other hand, we're telling them go out and study the national security aspects of global warming?
With that, Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 2 minutes.
Again, the debate is about a bill that the President has outlined in his veto statement is deeply flawed, deeply flawed in the content of what is in the bill as to what it directs the President to do and the limitations that it places on the executive branch in being able to conduct the war against radical jihadists effectively.
But it's also clear that the message clearly outlines the deficiencies of what is not in the bill: the inability and unwillingness of the Democratic leadership to bring to the House the Senate-passed FISA modernization bill; a bill that reflects the values of the Speaker of the House; a bill that reflects the values of the current Speaker of the House when she was on the Intelligence Committee in 2001 when these discussions were under way that talked about what do we need to do to give our intelligence community the tools that they need to keep America safe so that we can better understand the plans, the intentions, and the capabilities of al Qaeda and other radical jihadists.
That is where the Terrorist Surveillance Program took root. Bipartisan, the President, the leadership of the House and the Senate, the leadership of the Intelligence Committees, and all of them united in saying we need to give this tool, this Terrorist Surveillance Program, to our intelligence community because it will allow us to collect the information, the data, that we can use to keep America safe. And that program was in place for over 5 years. It was in place and it proved to be very successful. And now for 30 days, almost 30 days, we've been unable to use that tool.
Mr. Speaker, with that I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 2 minutes.
I applaud my colleagues for speaking with such passion. I wish they had the same passion for addressing the tools that the leadership in the intelligence community have said that they have needed, that our intelligence professionals who are in the field have said that they have needed to keep America safe. And this leadership has been unwilling to bring it up for almost 30 days.
The tool that they want, the tool that they need, and the tool that has proven to be so effective is the Terrorist Surveillance Program, which is an updated version of FISA legislation. It takes the FISA legislation, it moves it forward, and it updates it. But for almost 30 days, that tool has been eroding, putting our troops at risk, putting our homeland at greater risk, putting other U.S. personnel who are oversees at greater risk, and putting our allies who depend so often on the work of our intelligence community, putting them at greater risk. As al Qaeda in Iraq has said they want to attack Jerusalem, as Hezbollah has said that they intend to retaliate for the death of Mughniyah 3 or 4 weeks ago, as the radicals seek to destabilize the regimes in the Middle East of modern Islamic countries, people that are working with us in the war and the threat against radical jihadists, our answer to them is we're going to curtail our intelligence activities, and as a result, you will be at greater risk because we are going to be of less assistance. We are not going to be able to give you the intelligence that you've been receiving for the last 5 years because our techniques are limited.
Mr. Speaker, with that I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 2 minutes.
The Detainee Treatment Act, 2005, prohibits cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment, the standard found in the convention against torture. It applies to anyone held by U.S. authorities. We have dealt with that issue. We dealt with it in 2005.
What my colleagues don't want to talk about is they don't want to talk about the other weaknesses in this bill. And it's clear, by what their actions have been for the last 4 weeks, they don't want to talk about FISA.
As my former ranking member has indicated, it is tough to pass an authorization bill. It is tough to pass legislation. She and I worked together and passed, with our colleagues in the Senate, an Intelligence Reform Act, which in many ways has worked and in some ways we need to go back and take a look at. But one of the things that we learned through that process is to make it work, you need to do it on a bipartisan basis.
The problem with this bill is that it is a partisan bill. It passed the Senate with a very narrow majority. It passed the House on a partisan vote. That's not how you're going to get it done. You're going to do it the same way that the Senate has done the FISA bill.
But the interesting thing is the model for getting something done, which is a bipartisan bill, which is what we did on intelligence reform, we had Republicans and Democrats who came together to make it a majority; and we also had Republicans and Democrats who opposed us, and it was sometimes very painful. Now, when the Senate has gone through that process and passed a bipartisan bill on FISA, the model, 27 Democrats, 41 Republicans coming together and modernizing FISA, the end result is this leadership on the House side refuses to deal with it. It's on every intelligence issue that we've dealt with in this Congress.
When it comes to national security, when it comes to intelligence, there is not an ounce of compromise. It's all about getting everything, and that's why the President vetoed this bill, because it is not a bipartisan bill. There are many weaknesses in it.
All the focus on their side is torture. Talk about FISA, which makes a real difference to our men and women in the intelligence community today.
Mr. Speaker, with that I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. Speaker, I will yield myself 1\1/2\ minutes.
Mr. Speaker, it's interesting, as we go through this process and we talk about what's in the bill, the provision that we are talking about, or at least the other side is talking about, is a provision that was dropped in in conference. It came from the Senate. It didn't come from the House. We ought to follow that model. Follow the leadership.
It's interesting, we follow the leadership here when it's a partisan vote coming from the Senate; but when it's a bipartisan effort from the Senate, the leadership on the Democratic side will not respond and will not follow.
On this bill, we are going to sustain the veto. It is a flawed bill through and through. It would be interesting for this House to do the right thing, to have a vote on a national security issue, the modernization of FISA, to bring that vote. I am very much afraid that we are going to go home Thursday or Friday of this week and we are going to go on a 2-week recess and, once again, we will not have dealt with the modernization of FISA.
That means that we will go through a period of 6, 7, 8 weeks of eroding capabilities, each and every day becoming more vulnerable to radical jihadists and other groups who want to harm America.
With that, I reserve the balance of my time.
I yield myself 2 minutes.
It is interesting to talk about waterboarding. It hasn't been done for 5 years. It is interesting to talk about we are going to get rid of cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment. We did that in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005. It is prohibited, prohibited on any person that is held in U.S. custody. So it is easy to talk about those things.
It is time that the House start doing the hard stuff and the heavy lifting. That heavy lifting has now been put off for almost 4 weeks. And my fear is that we will leave without having resolved the issue between the House and the Senate, and we will go away for 2 more weeks because the House and the Democratic leadership refuses to do the heavy lifting and refuses to do the hard stuff. They are willing to go back and do the stuff that was done in 2005 and address issues that haven't occurred for over 5 years. But when it comes to keeping America safe and doing what is necessary and giving the tools to the intelligence community to keep us safe, leadership of this House is unwilling to act and is unwilling to do what is necessary.
With that, I reserve the balance of my time
I yield myself 1 minute.
The Detainee Treatment Act outlaws cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment. There seems to be a sense of urgency to do what we have done and do it again. It is too bad that there is no sense of urgency to give our individuals in the intelligence community the tools that they need to keep us safe.
The Senate has passed FISA. We should do the same thing. And we should do it before we go home. We need to start doing national security issues in a bipartisan basis. The longer we continue going down this path of making national security and intelligence issues purely partisan, some might call them purely political issues, we risk the security and the safety of the American people.
With that, I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from California (Mr. Issa).
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of the time.
Mr. Speaker, I encourage my colleagues today to sustain the President's veto. This is an ill-advised bill. This goes back to what we did in the 1990s, ``bugs and bunnies,'' telling our intelligence folks that it is time to focus your resources and your skills on studying the national security implications of global warming.
There are many problems with this bill. But the sense of urgency that we have in the intelligence community today is, as my colleague from California pointed out today, we are going to tell al Qaeda exactly what may happen. We are going to give them our playbook. And at the same time we have limited our ability to listen to radical jihadists.
It is now 26, 27, 28 days since FISA, or the Protect America Act, has expired. How many more days will my colleagues on the other side of the aisle
wait before they take up this legislation from the Senate? Will it be one more day? Will it be three more days? Will it be two more weeks? Will it be two more months? How much greater do you want to increase the risk to the homeland, to our allies, to our troops, before you act?
The Speaker of the House shortly after 9/11 agreed that we needed to act. It is beyond me why she doesn't want to act now and why we don't have that sense of urgency. It is time to bring FISA to the floor, and it is time to sustain the President's veto.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
