A bill to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide a Federal income tax credit for certain home purchases.

Mr. President, I wish to make a few comments on the amendment of the Senator from Wisconsin and what he referred to as the ``bulk collection'' amendment which he discussed yesterday and which is amendment No. 3912. I would ask that this time be taken from the opponents of the amendment, if that is all right with my vice chairman.

The Senator from Wisconsin is offering an amendment that he argues will prevent what he calls ``bulk collection''. The amendment is intended, as described by the Senator from Wisconsin, to ensure that this bill is not used by the Government to collect the contents of all the international communications between the United States and the rest of the world. The Senator argues that the amendment will prevent ``bulk collection'' by requiring the Government to have some foreign intelligence interest in the overseas party to the communications it is collecting.

I regret to say I must oppose this amendment strongly. I do not believe it is necessary. I do believe, as drafted, the amendment will interfere with legitimate intelligence operations that

protect the national security of the lives of Americans.

In considering amendments today, we need to consider whether an amendment would provide additional protections for U.S. persons and whether it would needlessly inhibit vital foreign intelligence collection. I do not believe the amendment, as drafted, provides additional protections. Furthermore, intelligence professionals have expressed their concern that this amendment would interfere with vital intelligence operations, and there are important classified reasons underlying that concern.

Let us review why the amendment is unnecessary. First, bulk collection resulting in a dragnet of all the international communications of U.S. persons would probably be unreasonable under the fourth amendment. No bill passed by the Senate may authorize what the fourth amendment of the Constitution prohibits. What is more, the committee bill, in fact, explicitly provides that acquisitions authorized under the bill are to be conducted in a manner consistent with that same fourth amendment of the Constitution.

Second, the committee bill stipulates that acquisitions under this authority cannot intentionally target any person known to be located in the United States. And to target a U.S. person outside the United States, the Government must get approval from the FISA Court.

Third, the committee bill increases the role of the FISA Court overseeing the acquisition activities of the Government. The bill requires court approval of minimization procedures that protect U.S. persons' information. It maintains the prior requirement of court approval of targeting procedures.

In the unlikely event the FISA Court would give its approval to targeting procedures and minimization procedures that allow the Government to engage in unconstitutional bulk collection, the committee bill also strengthens oversight mechanisms in the executive and legislative branches, such as requiring assessments by the inspectors general in the Department of Justice and relevant agencies. These mechanisms are intended to ensure that such activity is detected and prevented.

The sponsor of the amendment says his amendment only requires the Government to certify to the FISA Court that it is collecting communications of targets for whom there is a foreign intelligence interest. But the committee already requires the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence to certify to the FISA Court that the acquisition authorized under the bill is targeted at persons outside the United States in order to obtain foreign intelligence information. Because the remedy does not improve upon the protections in the bill for Americans and places new burdens on the surveillance of foreign targets overseas, I thus oppose this amendment and urge that it be rejected.

I yield the floor and reserve the remainder of the opponents' time.

Mr. President, I ask my esteemed vice chairman if I might have 6 minutes to oppose Senator Feingold's reverse targeting amendment No. 3913.

The Senator from Wisconsin has an amendment that requires a FISA Court order if the Government is conducting surveillance of a person overseas, but a significant purpose of the surveillance is to collect the communications of a person inside the United States with whom the target is communicating.

I share the Senator's goal in protecting the privacy interests of Americans, but I am afraid this amendment, as drafted, is unworkable and unnecessary.

The amendment is described as a way to prevent reverse targeting-- circumstances in which the Government would target persons overseas when its actual target is a person within the United States with whom the overseas person is communicating.

The fact is, reverse targeting is prohibited under FISA today. I repeat, it is prohibited under FISA today. If the person in the United States is the actual foreign intelligence target, the Government must seek a FISA order, and, in fact, the Government would have to have every incentive to do so in order to conduct comprehensive surveillance of such a person.

What is more, the base bill, S. 2248, makes the prohibition on reverse targeting explicit. The Government cannot use the authorities in this legislation to target a person outside the United States if the purpose of such acquisition is to target for surveillance a person within the United States.

In addition, the base bill, the Intelligence Committee bill, also strengthens the protection of U.S. person information that is collected in the targeting of foreign targets overseas by requiring that the FISA Court approve the minimization procedures that apply to this collection activity.

The Feingold reverse targeting amendment, however, goes too far. The amendment would prohibit the Government from using the authorities of this act ``if a significant purpose'' of the acquisition is to ``acquire the communications'' of a particular known person within the United States. In order to acquire such communications, the Government would be required to seek a regular FISA Court order.

The problem is that we are revising the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act today in large measure precisely because we want the intelligence community to have the ability to detect and acquire the communications of terrorists who call into the United States. In other words, in order to detect and prevent terrorist attacks, finding out if a foreign terrorist overseas is in contact with associates in the United States is actually a significant purpose of this legislation, and it will always be a significant purpose of any targeting of a foreign terrorist target overseas by the intelligence community.

As the Statement of Administration Policy--that is objections usually that come over from the White House--points out:

A significant purpose of the intelligence community

activities is to detect communications that may provide

warning of homeland attacks and that may include

communication between a terrorist overseas who places a call

to associates within the United States. A provision that bars

the intelligence community from collecting those

communications is unacceptable.

Who is to say that person from overseas is not a terrorist and he is contacting a person in the United States to discuss something which is not in the national interest or which has intelligence implications? You cannot in good conscience bar the intelligence community from collecting these communications. That is unacceptable.

Again, reverse targeting is prohibited under current law. I think that is the third time I have said that. Reverse targeting is prohibited by the committee bill. The amendment is not needed to achieve its stated goals. It will harm vital intelligence collection. I urge the amendment be defeated.

I reserve the remainder of our time.

Mr. President, I ask that I be given unanimous consent to speak on the underlying bill.

Mr. President, I say to the Presiding Officer that far and away the most contentious issue in this FISA debate is whether private companies that assisted the Government in implementing the President's warrantless surveillance program should be provided liability protection.

Three amendments will be offered that relate directly to this issue.

First, Senators Dodd and Feingold have an amendment that would strike all of title II of the underlying bill--that is, S. 2248--on liability protection as reported by the Intelligence Committee.

Second, Senator Specter will offer an amendment--I think at 3:30-- that provides for a different remedy; namely, the substitution of the U.S. Government itself for the carriers in the lawsuits that have been filed against the carriers.

Third, Senator Feinstein has prepared an amendment that would keep the basic structure of title II--to wit, liability immunity--but would have the courts, rather than the Congress, determine whether carriers relied in good faith on the representation made to them by the executive branch of our National Government.

I will address the particulars of each amendment as it is offered, but first I would like to describe the background behind the Intelligence Committee's approach to this whole issue of immunity.

Critics have suggested that providing liability protection for telecommunications companies is akin to congressional endorsement of the President's warrantless surveillance program. I understand the passion stirred by this issue. Rather than consulting with Congress or the courts, the President created a secret surveillance program--no question about that--based on very dubious legal reasoning. That was unnecessary, that was unwise, that would, therefore, cause passions and suspicions.

But anger over the President's program should not prevent us as a deliberative body from addressing the real problems the President has created.

Because of the lawsuits over the program and the damage to the telecommunications companies' reputations, companies that were once willing to help the Government, based on assurances of legality from the highest levels of Government, may now be questioning that assistance.

Let's reflect on that for a moment. These are corporations. They have no names at the present time. They have to make money. The Government comes to them, as they have in the past on much smaller matters, and with the authority of the President saying, this is in the national interest; with the legal advice of the Attorney General saying, this is legal; and then the Director of the National Security Agency sending out letters that say, we require you, we compel you, we request to you--or other words--that you cooperate with us.

People say: Well, they cooperated. Of course they cooperated right after 9/11. I think anybody who is in the intelligence business understands what I am saying. There is no difference between the day after 9/11 and this day in terms of the threat to our country or those who are planning, plotting to do us harm.

The fact that no attacks have happened does not excuse the sense of relaxation on the whole subject--perhaps the congressional sense of relaxation on the whole subject. We need to continue this intelligence collection.

What is it, I am wondering, that the telecommunications companies get from this? What prestige? What large amount of money? What praise? What do they get from this? Do they get good public relations? No. They get 40 lawsuits, most of which are not based on anything to do with the TSP program. In other words, they are picked out of newspapers. People are dissatisfied, and class action suits arise.

So maybe they have been sued $10 billion. Maybe they have been sued $40 billion. We will not speculate on that at the present time. But in that they are corporations and in that they have no reward at all for doing this service for their country--which we call patriotism, and then cast that aside because that must mask some evil intent--they go ahead and they do it. Then, since they are corporations, their shareholders get extremely unhappy about it, which could be happening at the present time, and then they decide that maybe they will be less willing to do this. Several have done that. Several at the beginning did that.

Now, corporations are in business also to make a profit. The corporations that are involved in this are doing nothing but losing prestige, losing reputation, have angry shareholders. And I ask myself, what is it they get out of doing this, because people, particularly on my side of the aisle, are sometimes inclined to be suspicious of corporations, that they have some kind of a purpose behind all of this. Nothing could be further from the truth. They are losing. They are being criticized. They are being sued. It is costly. It takes away from their energy to carry out their other missions. It is not a situation in which a whole bunch of people are sitting around in these corporate headquarters discussing this, because only a very few people are allowed to know, and they have criminal sanctions against them if they tell anybody, should they have received any of these instructions from the Government.

So we are not talking about people here trying to undo the safety of the United States or to gain some kind of advantage for themselves. If this intelligence collection stops, I say to the Presiding Officer, we will be in a very sorry situation. I do not know how to say that more sincerely, more deeply felt, more based upon exhaustive study, including numerous meetings in committee with these folks and other meetings outside.

So they have been told it is legal, and by the National Security Agency Director they have been required, compelled, and in other words, some of which are quite strong, to do it. So they do start to do it, and they are paying one heck of a price for it.

What price are we paying? We are paying no price because they are still doing it. What price might we pay should they stop--because they are corporations, and they are responsible to their shareholders--if they should stop this type of activity? The price we would pay would be overwhelming. Without the cooperation and assistance of private companies--not compliance forced by a court but true cooperation--this country's law enforcement and intelligence agencies cannot obtain the information they need to protect this country. It is a fairly heavy statement to make. I chair the committee. I am not naive on these matters. I make that statement again. Without the cooperation and assistance of private companies, this country's law enforcement and intelligence agencies cannot obtain the information they need to protect this country.

Making the question of liability protection a proxy for disagreement with the President's program is, therefore, shortsighted, in this Senator's view, ignoring the reality that the Nation and future Presidents will depend on the assistance of these same companies for years to come.

In analyzing the question of liability protection, the Intelligence Committee sought to weigh these very real concerns about future intelligence collection against the possible outcome of lawsuits. We discussed it at length. Understanding this issue requires some background on the lawsuits that have been filed.

Currently, providers are subject to approximately, as I indicated, 40 civil lawsuits, some of which are class actions, which seek billions of dollars of damages--and I have given you a range--for privacy violations based on the companies' alleged provision of assistance and information to the intelligence community. The suits are based--many of them--on media reports about all sorts of intelligence activities. Many of them are not limited to the warrantless surveillance program disclosed by the President. That is ironic, but it is a heavy burden for the companies. If suits are brought that have nothing to do with the warrantless surveillance program disclosed by the President, they are out of order. But, as I will proceed to explain, the companies can never explain to a court that they are out of order. Although these suits involve different types of legal claims that are in varying stages of litigation, they share a common reality: that the Government has refused to publicly reveal the classified documents and information that would allow them to proceed.

The current fight in the courts is, therefore, not about whether damages should be awarded, whether the underlying program is legal or even whether any company participated in the President's program in good faith. Instead, the parties are fighting about access to classified information about the President's program. I have not heard that much discussed in this Chamber. This litigation could continue for years without a court ever addressing the underlying issues about the legality of the program. We seek wrongdoing whether, as some say, it is in the corporate boardroom or, as others would say--as I would say--in the halls of Government.

I stress the point: No court is likely to resolve the question of whether the President or any private company violated the law in the near future.

Some of my colleagues have argued that without these lawsuits, the public will never learn the details about the President's program. But litigation is highly unlikely to tell the story of what happened with the President's program. Too many of these facts dealing with intelligence sources and methods remain appropriately classified, and the executive branch is highly unlikely to agree to declassify additional information if it could affect the ongoing litigation.

Thus, the litigation is unlikely to result in a ruling in the near future about the legality of the conduct of the President nor any private company, nor, for that matter, the public disclosure of any additional information about the President's program. Instead, it is possible the cases, as I indicated, will continue for years as the courts debate whether information must be disclosed.

In the meantime, however, as I mentioned, the litigation poses a serious risk to U.S. intelligence collection. That is my job and that is the job of the committee I chair and the job of the chairman of the Intelligence Committee in the House. We are not about being courts, we are about trying to balance civil liberties as best as we can

with the ability of this country to collect an entirely different kind of intelligence that we were so busy doing recently in the Cold War era. Without the assistance of telecommunications providers, our intelligence community simply cannot obtain the intelligence it needs.

Is that a serious statement? Do Members of the Senate concern themselves with that? Is this just me, this Senator, standing up making a statement trying to win some votes? Or is there the possibility it could be true? If there is a possibility--and I think it is a probability it is true--then I don't understand why people can be confused on this subject because I think the choices are clear. Allowing companies to be dragged through the court system because of their alleged cooperation with the Government encourages them not to cooperate with any request, even those that are clearly legal without court compulsion. It also sends a message to all private companies: cooperate with the U.S. Government at your peril. Is that a bit of an overstatement? In the corporate boardrooms around this country, my guess is that is the discussion. Very few corporations have the capacity to help the Government in the way telecommunications companies do.

Discouraging private sector cooperation with the Federal Government is not, in the feeling of this Senator, the right long-term result for either the intelligence community or the American people.

Many have argued that providers who act unlawfully should be held accountable. I totally agree that all Americans, including corporate citizens, must follow the law and be held accountable for their failures. Companies that deliberately seek to evade privacy laws or legal restrictions on electronic surveillance can and should be subject to civil suit, but that is not the issue here, I would say to the Presiding Officer. That is not the issue.

The Intelligence Committee spent a lot of time, as I have indicated, this year looking into what happened over the past 6 years. Before deciding to provide liability protection for the companies, the Intelligence Committee heard testimony from relevant witnesses and carefully reviewed the written communications provided to participants in the program.

Participants were sent letters, all of which stated the relevant activities had been authorized by the President and all but one--and that was done by the legal counsel to the President--of which stated the activities had been determined to be lawful by the Attorney General of the United States. Shouldn't private companies be entitled to rely on the written representations of the highest levels of Government officials that their cooperation is necessary and has been determined to be lawful? Can you argue that if they get those notifications from the NSA Director and it has been approved by the Attorney General and has been declared essential for the national interest by the President, should they instead say: Oh, well, we don't care about that. That is not our business. We are not going to do that.

And isn't it reasonable to assume that a U.S. citizen who has been told the Attorney General has found their cooperation to be lawful is acting in good faith? If they have been through this process and they proceed to act on it, why is it so easy to stipulate they are not acting in good faith? How does one show that? How does one imagine that?

I have been through this, this whole question of what the companies get from it, and it is the thing that bothers me so much. They get nothing but grief. They get suits. They get costs. They get a diminished reputation. They begin to pull away. Their shareholders lose confidence. Do they get money? No. They get nothing. So why would they want to continue to cooperate would be my question.

The answer to these questions are at the heart of the Intelligence Committee's determination that it is essential that Congress protect private companies that assisted the Government after the terrorist acts of 9/11.

Mr. President, I will complete this part of my presentation and yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that at 3:05 p.m. today the Senate return to the Cardin amendment No. 3930, with the time from 3:05 until 3:15 equally divided and controlled in the usual form; that the Senate then proceed to vote in relation to the amendment, with other provisions of the previous order remaining in effect.

This is a total of 10 minutes or less amendment, but we will not start until 3:05. The Senator can call it up.

I say to the Presiding Officer, I find myself in disagreement with my vice chairman. I originally wanted 4 years and we went to 6 years because of accommodations that yielded other results. In the wisdom of the joint Intelligence Committee and Judiciary Committee, settling on 4 years makes a lot of sense. I urge the adoption of the amendment.

Madam President, I am reluctant to ask, but I must, how much time remains before 4:30?

Wonderful.

Madam President, I simply rise to say I will oppose this amendment and I will oppose it strongly and I think for a series of very good reasons. But in spite of my eloquence and the ability to talk very quickly, I simply cannot do the task in 1\1/2\ minutes. So I ask unanimous consent to reserve my right to speak further at the appropriate time before the vote.

Mr. President, I would like to share some thoughts on the FISA legislation. It is critically important, and we need to pass the Intelligence Committee bill.

I will first say, in response to my able colleague from Illinois, that General Hayden's comments in which he indicated three people had been subjected to waterboard torture are something we ought to think about. First, I am glad, as he said and has been repeated, waterboarding was only used three times early on after 9/11 against some of the most dangerous people we have ever dealt with.

As a result of the debate and discussion about that, we had an amendment on the floor of the Senate, which Senator Kennedy offered to the Military Commissions Act in 2006, to prohibit waterboarding. It failed 46 to 53. We have a statute that does prohibit torture--Congress passed it overwhelmingly and it was supported by Senators Kennedy, Leahy, Biden, and others--that defined torture as infliction of severe physical or mental pain or suffering. I am glad we are no longer utilizing waterboarding. I hope we never have to do it again.

I just want to say to my colleagues, be careful how you portray the United States around the world.

Mr. Goldsmith, who has been quoted here and previously testified before our committee, has written a book. He said this war on terror has been the most lawyered war in the history of the Republic. Lawyers have been involved in everything. Great care has been given to ensure the law was followed. To compare waterboarding of 3 individuals to what was done to American prisoners by the Japanese in World War II is just unthinkable. To date, not a single prisoner whom we have captured in the War on Terror has died, to my knowledge, in American custody--maybe or one or two from some disease, but certainly not from abuse.

I just finished reading the book ``Hells Guest'' by Mr. Glenn Frazier from Alabama, a Bataan Death March survivor. About 90 percent of those prisoners died. They starved to death. They were beaten on a regular basis and abused in the most horrible way.

To even compare what was done to American soldiers wearing a uniform lawfully being a combatant to what has been done to a few people without any physical or permanent injuries is not fair. It is part of a rhetoric designed for political consumption at home that has embarrassed our country around the world and led decent people around the world to believe our military is out of control and we are systematically abusing and torturing prisoners when it is not so. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves to go on again and again about it.

We continue to be confused. Our country faces very real dangers. Terrorists are determined to damage this country. It is not just talk. We know it is true. They have done it before. They have attacked us around the world. They attacked us repeatedly before 9/11, and they desire to destroy our country.

Our administration made a decision after 9/11 that we could not treat these kinds of military attacks, designed to destroy our country by organized foreign forces, as normal law enforcement. I was a former Federal prosecutor. In a criminal prosecution, you try to catch people after they have committed the crime. But these acts are so horrible that the nature of them is such that they are acts of warfare and not crimes, and they need to be treated in that fashion. We remain somewhat confused about it. So the old policy meant you would investigate after the crime was committed. It was basically a stated or implicit policy of the Clinton administration. We cannot return to that kind of strategy.

One of the most important legal powers and authorities we have to defend America is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It has played a key role in preventing subsequent attacks on U.S. soil for the last 6 years. We are dealing with very real, very imminent threats, and we must continue to assist the fabulous military and intelligence personnel who are working this very moment long hours to protect our Nation.

I have visited our National Security Agency and met with the people who gather the intelligence under this act. They love America. These are not people who are trying to harm our country and deny us our liberties. They are sterling individuals who carefully follow the rules we give them. They follow the rules. They say they cannot continue effectively to do their job unless we pass this legislation. They cannot continue to do what they need to do.

The terrorists waging war against our country do not fight according to the rules of warfare, international law, moral standards, or basic humanity. They have even, in recent days, apparently used mentally ill women as suicide bombers, setting off bombs that have resulted in the deaths of other people, as well as the poor people who had the bombs strapped to them.

So, historically, we have provided the protections of the Geneva Conventions only to those whose conduct falls within the rules of war, those who fight under a flag of a nation, who wear uniforms against other organized military units. However, under a twisted rationale, predicated on the belief by some that we are not fighting a real war, we have given more rights to these individuals, who flatly reject any rule of war, than we have provided to legitimate prisoners of war who have followed the rules of war. We have done that in a number of different instances--it is sort of amazing to me--including providing them with habeas corpus relief to go to Federal court. These are not traditional prisoners of war, but prisoners who are unlawful enemy combatants. So we have endangered, sometimes I really believe, not only our troops, who put themselves in harm's way--and are in harm's way right now--to carry out the policies we gave them, but innocent Americans here at home.

We have to keep this threat in the forefront of our minds. These are individuals dead set on the destruction of our country at any cost. There is nothing they will not do.

Let me state that the FISA law should be made permanent. It should not merely be extended with another sunset provision. It is a fallacious argument to claim we cannot revisit a law unless there is some sunset when it ends. As Members of this Congress, it is incumbent upon us to continually review legislation we pass to ensure that the laws are accomplishing the goals set forth and that no unintended consequences occur. There is no sound reason to pass critical legislation such as the Protect America Act and slap an expiration date on it.

Fighting the war on terror is a long-term enterprise that requires long-term institutional changes. As the Vice President said in a recent speech:

The challenge to the country has not expired over the last

six months. It won't expire any time soon, and we should not

write laws that pretend otherwise.

The Intelligence Committee bill is a collaborative, bipartisan compromise that was crafted in consultation with members of the Intelligence Committee, the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Justice, and the intelligence community after months of negotiation and review of highly sensitive information, most of which was classified, secret, about the current surveillance procedures and how they were being used by the Government to obtain critical national security information. We cannot overstress that the committee most intimately involved with this process and the electronic measures being utilized voted their bill out by an overwhelmingly bipartisan 13-to-2 vote.

Remember, it has been over 6 years 4 months since the terrible attacks of September 11, and we may be most thankful that not one attack has been carried out on our soil since that day. As we move further from that dreadful day, I fear our memories have begun to fade. Otherwise, there is no sound justification for doing anything other than reauthorizing the Protect America Act, which would allow the intelligence community to simply continue, uninterrupted, their work which has been protecting this Nation and can continue to protect it in the future.

After the intelligence Committee passed a bill, the Senate Judiciary Committee, of which I am a member, got involved and produced a partisan bill. We already voted to table the partisan Judiciary substitute, and we debating the bipartisan Intelligence Committee bill. Let me point out, however, something that happened in the Judiciary Committee. The bill produced by

the committee was given very little process during one committee meeting where 10 Democratic amendments were accepted along a strict party-line vote, and the bill itself, ultimately, was voted out with only Democratic support. No Republican voted for it. It was a purely partisan bill.

Strikingly, the one vote that garnered bipartisan consideration was against an amendment that was offered by Senator Feingold to strip the retroactive liability protections found in section 2 of the Intelligence bill.

We had a discussion and vote on whether the liability protections to keep the companies that helped us and responded to Government requests--whether they should be sued for doing so--should be stripped from the bill. We voted in the Judiciary Committee, 12 to 7, to follow the recommendation of the Intelligence Committee bill that they passed 13 to 2, and keep the limited liability protections. So it was a 12-to- 7 vote to defeat the Feingold amendment that would have removed those liability protections.

Directly after that vote, however--it was curious how it all happened--but directly after that vote, Chairman Leahy moved to report only Title I of the Judiciary substitute bill out of Committee. When that passed, that effectively stripped the liability protection provisions the committee had just voted to keep.

The point is that the Democratic-controlled Judiciary Committee, when voting directly on removing retroactive liability, voted 12 to 7 to keep it. But by the time we passed out the Judiciary Committee's version of the bill, we had taken it out. I'm not sure people fully understand how that occurred, but it certainly was an odd thing that it passed out of committee without liability protection, when we specifically voted to keep that language in the overall bill.

Now, the main area of disagreement is over this important question that will be coming up, I understand, in the amendment offered by Senator Dodd, amendment No. 3907--and a Specter-Whitehouse amendment that will allow substitution--which will, in effect, allow litigation to continue against telecom companies that responded to the requests of the Attorney General of the United States, certified by the President. So our disagreement is whether we should provide these good corporate citizens who cooperated with a formal written request by the Attorney General of the United States, certified by the duly-elected President of the United States, to provide information for a surveillance program implemented shortly after the attacks on September 11--and at that point in time, we did not know how many terrorist cells there were in the country and what plans they may have had.

Now, the nature of the program is highly classified, but after an uproar of complaints, the procedures were studied carefully by Congress, and we reacted by giving approval to the program in passing the Protect America Act overwhelmingly last August. I did not want to be too lighthearted about it, but I remember all the brouhaha that this program was somehow wrong and had to be eliminated, and people made all these unsubstantiated allegations. But after we went in great depth, we found, as Mr. Goldsmith said, that the lawyers have been on top of this since day one. It was a carefully constructed program. A court opinion issues last spring caused us to not be able to continue the way it was being done, and the Intelligence community asked us for legislation so it could continue. The Congress passed the Protect America Act this summer, but it was a short-term bill that lasted only 6 months.

All I would want to say is, nobody apologized to President Bush or the Attorney General of the United States or the people at the National Security Agency for all the bad things they said about them. After having studied what they did, we concluded it is constitutional and legal and proper and necessary, and we actually passed a law to authorize it to continue.

But still, there have been over 30 lawsuits now filed against telecom providers for their alleged participation in the terrorist surveillance program--30 lawsuits. Analysis of these lawsuits leads only to the conclusion that the plaintiffs are substituting speculation and a fevered brow for fact and are ignoring the dangerous consequences these lawsuits can have on our national security.

I do not know who is actually filing these lawsuits. I will just say this, parenthetically: Last October, before the last election, Lancet magazine produced a report--a medical magazine in England--that said 500,000 to 700,000 Iraqis were killed by the American military in Iraq. And ABC, CBS, and our Democratic colleagues all raised cane that, unbelievably, we would kill this many people. After the election was over--and by the way, the guy who wrote the report said he wanted to be sure it came out before the election--we learned some things about it.

In a fabulous article in the National Journal, an unbiased magazine, they detailed the fraudulence of that article, and pointed out that even an antiwar group said, at most, it was 50,000, not 500,000 or 700,000. And where did they find out the money for the Lancet article came from? George Soros, and the MoveOn.Org crowd. The ``blame America first'' crowd. Well, I don't know who is actually funding these lawsuits. We ought to ask some questions about it. Certainly there is no indication that anybody's liberties have been impacted adversely.

If these suits are allowed to continue, we face a number of problems. The sources and methods relied on by our intelligence community to conduct surveillance are highly classified, and if these lawsuits are allowed to proceed, even allowing for the Government to be substituted for the telecom companies, we run the risk of exposing the things our enemies really want: classified national security information. Make no mistake, if forced to defend themselves against lawsuits brought about because they cooperated with a government request certified to be legal, companies will certainly hesitate or refuse outright to cooperate in the future. Even where substitution by the Government is an option, we would be putting national security decisions in the hands of corporate counsels in the future whose duties--and their first responsibilities--extend to the stockholders of their company, and not the national security.

If we ask a company to help us, do we want all the lawyers in that company to say: Wait a minute. The last time we worked with you government we got sued, and we are going to review all of this because some court may hold this--or George Soros may fund some lawsuit and tie us up in court. We don't think we want to help. I think they would naturally take that tack in the future to resist cooperation.

During floor debate in December, the distinguished chairman of the Intelligence Committee, our Democratic colleague Senator Rockefeller, said this. This is what he said about the matter:

Our collective judgment--

and he is talking about the Intel Committee members--

Our collective judgment on the Intelligence Committee is

that the burden of the debate about the President's authority

should not fall on the telecommunications companies--

In other words, the debate about whether the President had authority to do this shouldn't fall on the telecommunications counsels--

because they responded to the representations by Government

officials at the highest levels that the program had been

authorized by the President and determined to be lawful and

received requests, compulsions to carry it out. Companies

participated at great risk of exposure and financial ruin for

one reason, and one reason only: in order to help identify

terrorists and prevent follow-on terrorist attacks. They

should not be penalized for their willingness to heed the

call during a time of national emergency.

Senator Rockefeller said that.

The ranking member of the Judiciary Committee who favors substitution has stated this, flat out:

The telephone companies have acted as good citizens.

Certainly they have. In many instances, the Government must seek assistance from the private sector and private individuals to help protect our national security and even local security in our communities. In order for this practice to continue, we must allow them to rely on assurances that the assistance they provide is not only legal but essential to protect our national security without fear that they will have their names dragged through

the mud by protracted litigation initiated by the ``blame America first'' crowd which subscribes to wild theories about Government conspiracies to deny people their liberty. They are forgetting the safety of America, and they are ignoring sound legal precedent.

Some in this body sincerely believe that liability protection is not needed if these companies did nothing wrong, they say. Well, this is faulty reasoning since either allowing the lawsuits to proceed or substituting the Government will still force them to be a party to lawsuits that run the risk of exposing national security information or doing irreversible financial and reputational damage to companies innocent of any wrongdoing. We are putting these companies in harm's way when they, bound by a sense of patriotism and civic responsibility, participate in a government program that was certified to be legal by the Attorney General of the United States and the President of the United States.

If the Government is substituted--in accordance with one of the theories that has been offered--in the place of a particular company, it will most certainly assert the state secrets privilege, leaving, in effect, the company virtually impotent when it comes to mounting a defense and showing what their legitimate actions were. Due to the nature of this state secrets privilege, a company will be forbidden from making their case and will be left without the ability to even confirm or deny their participation in the program. We should applaud the actions of these citizens, not stab them in the back by suing them for their actions.

To refresh everyone's memory, the Intelligence Committee, after months of negotiation in highly classified settings, rejected an amendment to strip liability protection from the bill for these companies by a vote of 12 to 3. It then passed the bill out in toto by a bipartisan vote of 13 to 2, protecting these companies from lawsuits.

The Judiciary Committee, on the other hand, had one markup after less than 2 weeks of reviewing the Intelligence Committee's legislation, and rejected an amendment specifically that would have denied liability protection by a vote of 12 to 7. So we voted not to allow them to be sued either. Furthermore, the Judiciary Committee rejected an amendment to allow the Government to be substituted for the plaintiffs by a vote of 13 to 5. We rejected substitution too, although the liability protections were ultimately removed from the bill the Judiciary Committee passed.

Even if the Government is substituted, plaintiffs in litigation will seek discovery, they will file depositions and ask for interrogatories and motions to produce. They will seek trade secrets and highly classified technologies. Companies would still face many litigation burdens. They would be--we would be subjecting them to harm, not only from consumer backlash, but their international business partners will be pressured around the world.

Under the limited liability protections incorporated in the Intel bill, plaintiffs seeking to question the Government will have their day in court as it only protects good corporate citizens from civil suit. So the liability protections in this bill do not preclude lawsuits against the Federal Government from going forward. In fact, there are at least seven lawsuits currently pending against the Government that will proceed against the Government or Government officials. This was accepted by the Intelligence Committee. Some wanted to say you couldn't sue the Government for these activities also, but the Intel Committee reached an agreement, an overwhelmingly bipartisan agreement, that would allow those lawsuits to proceed.

The companies that helped the Government did so to help protect us from further attack, and valuable information has been gathered with their help. I have been out to the National Security Agency. I have talked with the people. I know they scrupulously follow the rules we give them, and I know they have gained great, valuable information through this program, and I know they lost very valuable information when the program had to be stopped. This information has saved undoubtedly countless American lives by enabling our intelligence community to thwart attacks.

Some have said this amounts to amnesty, but that couldn't be further from the truth. Amnesty is an act of forgiveness for criminal offenses, such as granting citizenship to people who broke the law to come into our country illegally. The companies were operating under a certification of legality in a time of national danger doing what they could as Americans to follow the law and prevent future attacks. At no point during their participation were their actions illegal. For Heaven's sake. To grant liability protection is to adhere to that great Anglo-American legal tradition for hundreds of years that when called upon by a law officer, with apparent legal authority, wearing a uniform, out on the street, a citizen is not to be held legally liable if, in responding to the officer, the officer was wrong. That is all we are talking about. That is a fundamental, historical, legal principle. The only question--the legal question has always been simply this: whether the citizen was responding to a legitimate request by a government law officer, a police officer to chase a bad guy. Was the citizen acting reasonably in believing this was a legitimate law enforcement request and he was helping by being a good citizen. That is the test. If he participated knowingly with somebody acting illegally, then that citizen could be liable. Certainly certification by the Attorney General and the President of the United States in written documents suffices as a legitimate request.

The bottom line is, we do not need to pass legislation that panders to the extreme interest groups in America who find fault in everything our people do, our law enforcement and intelligence officers, and that fosters a fundamental mistrust of those officials who are working daily to serve all of us. The burden should not fall on the shoulders of good corporate citizens who are acting patriotically to help save lives and protect our country.

I urge my colleagues to vote to support the Intel Committee bill, a carefully crafted, carefully studied, bipartisan bill. I also urge my colleagues to support the liability protections in the Intelligence Committee legislation and a vote against any amendments that attempt to strip these provisions or in any way alter the carefully structured, limited provisions of the bill.

I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

Mr. President, I am glad the majority leader has come to speak about this issue. It is hard to imagine what is going through the mind of the President that he believes he can make an argument tomorrow with the meeting at the White House, that we have been unreasonable in dealing with his nominations.

Senator Reid spelled out what happened. We tried, in many ways, to get some balance in nominations. That is done all the time so Republicans and Democrats will be appointed. It is done by both parties. I have seen it in the years I have been around the Senate. When Senator Reid made that offer in December, the White House said: No, they would not do it unless they could have this one nomination, Mr. Bradbury. And I will have to say I think Senator Reid went that extra mile, an extra 84 miles, as a matter of fact, and he basically said 84 of those Bush nominees would be confirmed.

The majority leader recounted several phone calls he received this week from Democratic nominees to bipartisan commissions. I heard from my friend, Tom Carper, not the Senator from Delaware but a friend of mine from McComb, IL, who has been nominated to serve on the board of directors of Amtrak.

Tom has been working on passenger rail issues for 20 years, 12 years as mayor of the city of McComb, IL, which is served by Amtrak. As mayor, he served as the chairman of the Amtrak Mayor's Advisory Council. He received national recognition for his leadership on Amtrak issues.

He saw firsthand the enormous potential that passenger rail service can have for towns, such as McComb, small towns that might be overlooked otherwise. He helped to make the potential of Amtrak service a reality. We have such a success story of Amtrak in Illinois in the last year or two, with dramatic increases in ridership. Tom saw this coming and was a real leader. He convinced the State of Illinois to double its State investment in Amtrak. He worked with a broad coalition of passenger, business, labor groups, and elected officials to increase Amtrak service across our State.

We are experiencing a renaissance in terms of passenger rail in our State in a short period of time. Senator Reid was given an opportunity to fill a vacancy on the Amtrak board. I asked him to consider former Mayor Tom Carper of McComb, IL. He was kind enough to recommend him. There are seven voting members on the Amtrak bipartisan board--three Republicans, three Democrats, and the Secretary of Transportation. Currently, there are four vacancies on the board, which means the board does not have enough members for a quorum, and it forces the board to conduct business via an ``Executive committee.''

On our last day of session in December, Senator Reid, I think through great effort and courtesy, rose above the President's refusal to cooperate on nominations and worked to confirm more than 80 nominations in a single day. But we could have--and should have--confirmed at least two more. Senator Reid and I worked together and offered to confirm two nominees to the Amtrak board--one Democrat, Tom Carper, and one Republican, both of whom had been favorably reported by the Commerce Committee.

The Republicans objected. They insisted that we confirm one Democrat and two Republicans or none at all. Now, this ``all-or-nothing'' approach is not new. We have seen this before when it comes to nominations.

As the majority leader described, I think the most glaring example of this is the nomination of Steven Bradbury to be Assistant Attorney General. The majority leader was willing to allow additional confirmations--and even recess appointments--for a number of nominations.

I can tell you, having dealt with Senator Reid, he bends over backward to be balanced in this approach. That is the way it has to be in the Senate. That is the way the institution operates. But the White House turned down his offer. They turned down his offer because of one nomination, the nomination of Steven Bradbury.

It was clear this request, Mr. Bradbury, was going to be rejected. Mr. Bradbury's nomination has been returned to the White House four times since he was first nominated for the job in June 2005. What part of ``no'' does the White House fail to understand?

Why does the President care so much about this one nominee that he is willing to sacrifice all these other nominees? He is going to fill the White

House with people who are going to have this fine White House china in front of them, sipping coffee and tea and eating little cookies and complaining that somehow or another the Democrats in the Senate are ignoring their need to serve our Government.

We are not ignoring it. Senator Reid has offered repeatedly to confirm these nominees on a balanced basis, even giving the President 84 nominees without this balance. They have said: No deal unless we get Steven Bradbury. He is the only appointment, clearly, who is important to this administration. Why? What is it about this man? What would possibly be in his background or his potential for future service that would be so important?

Well, this is worth talking about for a minute. Steven Bradbury is the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, also known as OLC. OLC is a small office and most people have never heard of it, but it has a great deal of power, especially in this administration. The Office of Legal Counsel issues legal opinions that are binding on the executive branch of Government.

In the Bush administration, OLC has become a rubberstamp for torture policies that are inconsistent with American values and laws. In August of 2002, the Office of Legal Counsel issued the infamous torture memo. This memo sought to redefine torture, narrowing it to a limited situation of abuse that causes pain equivalent to organ failure or death. These words meant the United States was preparing to abandon generations of commitment to outlawing and prohibiting torture. This memo also concluded the President has the right to ignore the torture statute, which makes torture a crime. This memo was official Bush administration policy for years, until it was finally leaked to the media, and the administration was forced to repudiate it.

Jay Bybee, who was then the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, signed that memo. Unfortunately, Mr. Bybee was confirmed to a lifetime appointment on the Federal bench in the Ninth Circuit before Congress and the American people learned about his complicity in the creation of this infamous torture memo, a memo that was repudiated by the Bush administration once it became public.

Jack Goldsmith succeeded Jay Bybee as head of the Office of Legal Counsel. Mr. Goldsmith is a very conservative Republican, but even he was disturbed when he heard what was happening at the Office of Legal Counsel.

As head of that office, he revoked the misguided OLC opinions dealing with warrantless surveillance and torture. He decided those opinions went too far.

Deputy Attorney General Jim Comey supported Mr. Goldsmith's actions. Let me say a word about Mr. Comey. My colleague and friend for years, Senator Schumer, first told me about Jim Comey when he was chosen to be the Deputy Attorney General under Attorney General Ashcroft. Senator Schumer told me Jim Comey was a straight shooter, an honest man who would not compromise his principles in public service. He said I could trust Jim Comey. During the period Jim Comey served in our Government, Chuck Schumer was right. Jim Comey enjoys that reputation because he earned it.

We now know what happened because it has come to light that there was an infamous showdown at the bedside of Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was hospitalized in an intensive care unit, where White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales tried to pressure a then-ailing John Ashcroft into overruling Jack Goldsmith and his acts in the Office of Legal Counsel. It is hard to imagine that they would go into a hospital wing, with the acting Attorney General and with the President's Chief of Staff, to a man in an intensive care unit and try to persuade him to sign a document to overrule Jack Goldsmith.

Fortunately, Attorney General John Ashcroft, to his credit, refused. When Jack Goldsmith finally left the Justice Department, the administration realized they did not need any more trouble from the Office of Legal Counsel, they needed someone in that office who would not rock the boat, would not question their opinions, someone who would rubberstamp their policies.

So, in June 2005, President Bush nominated Steven Bradbury to succeed Jack Goldsmith--Steven Bradbury, the person who has now become the centerpiece of the entire appointment agenda of the Bush administration. Although Mr. Bradbury has never been confirmed in this position, he has effectively been head of OLC for 2\1/2\ years.

In 2005, Mr. Bradbury reportedly signed two OLC legal opinions approving the legality of abusive interrogation techniques. One opinion, on so-called ``combined effects,'' authorized the CIA to use multiple abusive interrogation techniques in combination.

According to the New York Times, then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales approved this opinion of Mr. Bradbury over the objections of then Deputy Attorney General Jim Comey, who said the Justice Department would be ashamed if the memo became public.

Mr. Bradbury also authored and Alberto Gonzales approved another Office of Legal Counsel opinion, concluding that abusive interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, do not constitute cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment. This opinion was apparently designed to circumvent the McCain torture amendment. I was proud to cosponsor John McCain's torture amendment. We are in the midst of a Presidential campaign, and I suppose you have to be careful as a Democrat saying anything positive about a man who may be the Republican nominee.

But I could not think of another Senator who could speak with more authority on interrogation and torture than John McCain, who spent over 5 years in a Vietnam prison camp. He came to this floor and made an impassioned plea for us to make it clear that torture would not be part of American policy.

In the end, he won that amendment by a vote of 90 to 9, an amendment which absolutely prohibits cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment. Steven Bradbury, now infamous for his role in memo after memo relating to torture, felt he found a way, through an opinion, for the administration to avoid the impact of the law the President signed, the McCain torture amendment.

That is what this is about. This is not a casual situation where I find Mr. Bradbury personally offensive. We are going to the heart of a question as to whether this man can serve this country in this critical position in the White House based on what we have seen over and over again: his complicity in some of the most embarrassing chapters in this administration, including some that have been publicly repudiated.

Last fall, while the Senate was considering the nomination of Judge Michael Mukasey to be Attorney General, the judge pledged to me in writing that he would personally review all of the Office of Legal Counsel's opinions dealing with torture. He said he would determine whether each of these opinions can be provided to Congress and whether he agreed with the legal conclusions of each of these opinions. This promise made by Attorney General Mukasey to me, to the Judiciary Committee, and to the Senate is a matter of public record.

Last week, Attorney General Mukasey appeared before the same Judiciary Committee for the first time since he was confirmed. I asked him point-blank whether, as he had promised, he had reviewed all of the OLC torture opinions. I specifically asked him about Steven Bradbury's ``combined effects'' opinion, which Jim Comey said would shame the Justice Department if it became public. Sadly, the Attorney General said he had not reviewed those opinions. He realized that he had made a promise to me that he would, and we left it at that. He did acknowledge in the course of his testimony how much he respected Jim Comey, how he had turned to him for advice and believed he was an honorable man. I feel the same. I trust that Attorney General Mukasey is also an honorable man who will keep his word.

In the meantime, while all of this continues, Steven Bradbury remains as the effective head of the Office of Legal Counsel, even though it has been 2\1/2\ years since he was nominated and he has never been confirmed. Legislation known as the Vacancies Reform Act prohibits a nominee from serving for this long without confirmation. It makes a mockery of the confirmation process that Mr. Bradbury assumes a role he has never been given under the law. Apparently, he is so important to

the Bush administration, they are willing to violate this law to keep him in his position, and they are prepared to toss overboard scores of nominations which could be approved by this bipartisan Senate if they would only relent on this nominee, who is obviously not going to be approved. The fact that Mr. Bradbury continues to serve as the effective head of the Office of Legal Counsel appears to be an attempt to circumvent the confirmation process in order to install this controversial nominee in a key Justice Department post in the closing days of this administration.

Ironically, the Vacancies Reform Act to which I referred was passed by the Republican-controlled Congress in 1998 to limit the ability of then-President Clinton's nominees to continue to serve in an acting capacity. The legislation was specifically targeted at Bill Lann Lee, the first-ever Asian-American head of the Civil Rights Division. Apparently, the Bush administration is ignoring the very law which a Republican Congress passed to make it clear that the President does not have the authority to appoint people like Steven Bradbury in an acting capacity without confirmation.

Why has Mr. Bradbury not been confirmed? For years, the Justice Department has refused to provide Congress with copies of the opinions Mr. Bradbury authored on torture. Mr. Bradbury has refused to answer straightforward questions from myself and other members the Judiciary Committee regarding his role in this.

Here is what I said in November 2005 about Mr. Bradbury's nomination:

Since the Justice Department refuses to provide us with OLC

opinions on interrogation techniques, we do not know enough

about where Mr. Bradbury stands on the issue of torture. What

we do know is troubling. Mr. Bradbury refuses to repudiate

un-American and inhumane tactics such as waterboarding.

As I have said before, I believe that at the end of the day, when the history is written of this era, there will be chapters that will not be friendly to this administration.

In past wars, Presidents of both political parties have been guilty of excessive conduct, in their own view, as part of national security. One can remember the suspension of habeas corpus by President Lincoln during the Civil War, the Alien and Sedition Act of World War I, and the Japanese internment camps of World War II. All of these examples, as we reflect on them in history, do not reflect well on this country. Decisions were made which many wish could be undone. The same is likely to be true when it comes to the issue of torture and the war on terrorism under the Bush administration; this issue of warrantless surveillance, where for years, literally, this administration went beyond the law and attempted to intercept communications when they could have come to Congress and received bipartisan support for an approach which would have kept America and our Constitution safe.

Yesterday, we learned why Steven Bradbury is so important to the White House. We also learned why he refuses to condemn waterboarding. It was Super Tuesday, so a lot of political minds were focused on other places and other things. Unfortunately, it didn't get a lot of attention, but every American should know what happened yesterday on Capitol Hill.

In testimony before the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, CIA Director Michael Hayden acknowledged that the United States of America has used waterboarding, a form of torture, on three detainees. Waterboarding, or simulated drowning, is a torture technique that has been used since at least the Spanish Inquisition. It has been used by repressive regimes around the world.

Every year, the State Department issues a report card on human rights in which we are critical of other countries that engage in what we consider to be basic violations of human rights. Included in those basic violations is torture of prisoners. Included in that torture is waterboarding. So once a year we stand in judgment of the world and condemn them for engaging in waterboarding and torture techniques on their prisoners. Yet it is clear from the testimony yesterday of General Hayden that we have engaged in some of those techniques.

Following World War II, the United States prosecuted Japanese military personnel as war criminals for waterboarding American servicemen. The Judge Advocate Generals, the highest ranking military lawyers in each of the U.S. military's four branches, have stated publicly and unequivocally that waterboarding is illegal.

Now the United States of America has acknowledged engaging in conduct that we once prosecuted as a war crime. This is unacceptable.

Yesterday, I sent the Attorney General a letter. I wanted to spell out clearly for him, so there is no misunderstanding, why it is important that he respond to several requests which I have made for information. At the heart of it is a good man, a judge named Mark Filip, who serves in the Northern District of Illinois, a man whom I supported for his confirmation as a Federal judge and who has received positive reviews for his service on the bench.

Attorney General Mukasey would like Judge Filip to be his Deputy Attorney General. That is a good choice. But I have said to the Attorney General, there is only one thing between my enthusiastic vote for Mark Filip and his remaining on the calendar: The Attorney General has to respond to inquiries I have made, some of which were made months ago, on this critical issue of torture. I wanted to make certain that there was real clarity in my request. So I sent a letter to the Attorney General yesterday and said: Here is exactly what I am looking for, the letters we have sent, the questions we have asked, and I want you to respond to them. I hope I receive that response by the end of the day. If I receive that response and it is a good-faith response, even if I disagree with it, if it is a good-faith response, then Judge Filip can move forward. I hope he will. It is now in the hands of Attorney General Mukasey.

Let me highlight two of the questions I am asking: First, does Attorney General Mukasey agree with the legal conclusions of the Office of Legal Counsel torture memos written by Steven Bradbury, that Jim Comey believes the Justice Department would be ashamed of if they were made public? Second, will the Justice Department investigate the administration's use of waterboarding to determine whether any laws were violated? I didn't call for prosecution but simply for an honest investigation.

I recognize the Bush administration wants to confirm Steven Bradbury, to ensure they have a firewall to protect their torture policies. But what is at stake here is more important than this one nominee. This is about who we are as a country. This is about the United States, our values, our standards of conduct. This is about whether the United States can, with a straight face, be critical of regimes and countries around the world that engage in abusive interrogation techniques. This is about whether we protect American soldiers and American citizens from torture by unequivocally condemning those forms of interrogation. The United States cannot be a country that defends a practice which the civilized world has considered torture for over five centuries.

Democrats are willing to work with the President, in a bipartisan manner, to confirm nominations. But the President's response to the majority leader's work in confirming more than 80 nominations in December by renominating Steven Bradbury last month is not encouraging. If the President truly wants to confirm his nominations, he should not be pouring coffee and tea at the White House.

He ought to have his Chief of Staff, Mr. Bolten, pick up the phone and say: Let's get down to business. There are important Democrats and Republicans who can be appointed tomorrow if the President will understand that the entire fate and future of his administration should not hang on this one nominee, Steven Bradbury, who has been implicated in some of the most questionable practices of this administration. I hope the President and his Chief of Staff, after they have had their coffee with these potential nominees, will pick up the phone and work with us for the right result.

I yield the floor.

I announce that the Senator from New York (Mrs. Clinton) and the Senator from Connecticut (Mr. Lieberman) are necessarily absent.

Mr. President, I yield myself 6 minutes from the opposition to the amendment No. 3979, the Feingold-Webb sequestration.

During yesterday's sessions and prior sessions, there have been, regrettably, a number of inaccurate statements about the amendments we debated. Several of these amendments go to the very heart and strike at the very heart of foreign targeting. It is not an understatement to say that if they are adopted, they could shut down our intelligence collection and cause irreparable damage to our national security. So I am compelled to set the record straight. Working with my colleague and good friend, the chairman of the committee, Senator Rockefeller, we want our colleagues to know what impact these amendments have.

We have made great progress in the Senate Intelligence Committee on the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 in providing additional protections, but we did so working with the intelligence community to make sure the measures we put in the bill would actually work.

Now, the first amendment we debated was amendment No. 3979, the sequestration amendment supported by and sponsored by Senators Feingold and Webb. In explaining this amendment, supporters claimed the Protect America Act was ``sold repeatedly'' as a way to collect foreign-to- foreign communications without a court order and this amendment allows this collection. We saw from the House RESTORE Act, which the DNI has told us--the Director of National Intelligence, whom I will refer to as the DNI--and from the debate on the Protect America Act that the focus on foreign-to-foreign communications is misplaced. The Protect America Act was intended to allow foreign targeting, just like this bill and for good reason. We cannot tell if a foreign terrorist is going to be calling or communicating with another foreign terrorist whether in some other country or whether some of that communication may occasionally come to the United States, and there is no way to tell. So it does no good to give the intelligence community authority to collect only foreign-to-foreign communication. You can't tell. That means you can't collect on any without getting a FISA Court or a FISC order. That was an impossible burden that the FISC judges told us overwhelmed and shut down their operations and did not protect American citizens. Yet we were told yesterday this amendment will not damage or slow down collection.

This amendment will not just slow down collection; it will stop it. It will stop it. In the words of one intelligence official, it would ``devastate our operations.''

Now, our bipartisan bill gives the intelligence community the ability to target terrorists, foreign terrorists overseas. That targeting is not, as has been suggested on the other side, ``dragnet surveillance.'' Rather, the intelligence community will be acquiring communications of foreign terrorists, spies, and others who seek to do us harm. That is not a dragnet; that is targeted. But if this amendment were to be adopted, its unreasonable limitations will prevent the intelligence community even from beginning the collection.

Now, I argued yesterday this amendment would prevent the intelligence community from intercepting the communications of Osama bin Laden with somebody in the United States. The Senator from Wisconsin disagreed, calling my argument questionable and claiming the amendment in no way hampers the ability to fight al-Qaida. That is not true. I find it interesting because that is not what his amendment says. First, the intelligence community can't even start the collection because there is no way to know if a terrorist, including bin Laden, is going to call or be called by a person in the United States. Second, from the amendment, page 2, lines 10 to 16:

Such communications may be acquired if there is reason to

believe that the communication concerns international

terrorist activities directed against the United States, or

activities in preparation therefor.

That means if bin Laden were planning an attack against the United Kingdom or against our foreign military bases or our foreign embassies abroad and calls into the United States to talk with an associate, we could not capture that call and protect our troops, protect our citizens, protect our officers overseas, because under the terms of the amendment, it does not concern activities directed against the United States. Not only is the limitation dangerous, it is unwise, unhelpful, and could lead to significant intelligence shortfalls.

Another dangerous aspect of the amendment is that it would foreclose the collection of foreign intelligence relating to nonterrorist threats. Our Nation faces daily threats, for example, from the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. I have an amendment that deals with this issue specifically. What about North Korea, Iran, and Syria? Under this amendment, none of that information could be collected if the communication was to or from the United States. That is a limitation that should make all of us uncomfortable. There is no basis for it, it is unreasonable, and it could lead our country into severe jeopardy.

The DNI and the Attorney General agree with my reading of the amendment. Yesterday, we received a letter from them expressing their views about these amendments. The DNI and Attorney General stated that if this amendment is part of the bill presented to the President, they would recommend a veto. They wrote this in their letter:

This amendment would have a devastating impact on foreign

intelligence surveillance

operations; it is unsound as a matter of policy; its

provisions would be inordinately difficult to implement; and

thus it is unacceptable.

Ironically, this amendment is being advertised as the best way to protect America's privacy. But a fundamental problem with the amendment is that we can never know ahead of time what a communication says. Let's think it through. In order to figure out whether the communication concerns international terrorism, for example, an analyst will have to review the content of it. That actually results in more of an invasion of privacy than would ever occur under the standard minimization procedures that NSA uses every day. That makes no sense if we are trying to protect privacy.

Mr. President, it is news to me that the Intelligence Committee bill, as claimed on the other side, has no judicial involvement and no judicial oversight. I have said it before. This bill has more judicial oversight and involvement in foreign intelligence surveillance than ever before. There is court review and approval of the joint certification by the Attorney General and the DNI and of the targeting minimization procedures. If the court finds any deficiency in these documents, the Government must correct it or cease the acquisition. That is not an empty oversight.

The Intelligence Committee bill doesn't stop there. We took tremendous care to make sure there were specific protections for Americans' privacy in the bill. I suggest all Members look closely at these protections: express prohibitions against reverse targeting, against targeting persons inside the United States without a court order, against conducting any acquisition that doesn't comply with the fourth amendment. This bill goes further than ever before in ensuring that there are protections for Americans in the area of foreign targeting.

We heard the tired accusation that this bill will allow the intelligence community to intercept communications of anyone; that it gives ``unrestrained access to communications of every American.'' That is just plain wrong. Communications of U.S. persons will be intercepted only if those persons are talking to foreign terrorists or spies. And because of the minimization procedures, only those specific communications will be intercepted, and if they don't contain foreign intelligence value, then they will be minimized or suppressed.

According to the Senator from Wisconsin, this amendment is necessary because the minimization procedures in FISA are ``quite weak'' and inadequate. I am sure the FISA Court judges who have reviewed and approved these procedures would appreciate the implication that they are doing a bad job of protecting the privacy of Americans. Ironically, it is that same court that, under the Senator's amendment, will control the Government's access and use of incidental communications.

Mr. President, I reserve the remainder of our time and yield the floor.

I am happy to yield that time to the chairman.

Mr. President, I yield myself 3 minutes on amendment No. 3913.

It is interesting to hear that the proponent of this amendment thinks the letter laying out the reasons against the amendment are reasons for it. That is a trick I have not learned, to say that when somebody says that the reverse targeting amendment would make it impossible when that person and those people really represent the agency responsible and the oversight body of the Department of Justice somehow makes their case.

I also call the attention of my colleagues to a statement from the Civil Liberties and Privacy Office of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. In that statement, the Civil Liberties and Privacy Office says:

Concerns have been raised that the PAA could result in the

interception of U.S. person communications. As explained in

the Department of Justice September 14 letter, and in a

letter by the DNI's Civil Liberties Protection Officer dated

September 17, 2007, U.S. persons' privacy interests are

protected through ``minimization procedures,'' which must

meet FISA's statutory definition. In addition, ``reverse

targeting'' is implicitly prohibited under existing law.

As a side note, Mr. President, this measure explicitly prohibits reverse targeting, but the Privacy Office goes on to say:

The SSCI bill in addition requires review of minimization

procedures and explicitly prohibits reverse targeting. In

addition, the bill provides the FISA court with ongoing

access to compliance reports and information about U.S.

person disseminations and communications, and the explicit

authority to correct deficiencies in procedures. The bill

also requires annual reviews of U.S. person disseminations

and communications and extensive reports to Congress.

This is a clear statutory framework. As a practical matter, if there was a desire to target someone in the United States, if that person was thought to have foreign intelligence information and acting as an agent of a foreign power, an officer, or employee, a FISA Court order is the simplest way to do it. Nobody has explained how you can target a foreign terrorist to get collections on a particular U.S. person unless that person is engaged in a terrorist activity, and you have to target an overseas person who has foreign intelligence information, and that is the legitimate reason for making the collection against the foreign target. No terrorist information. The information is minimized and not used.

I yield the floor and reserve the remainder of the time.

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I think our colleague is going to speak in morning business. But I will be happy to yield to the Senator from Texas.

If we can yield to the Senator from Texas for 10 minutes on the bill, the Senator from Idaho for morning business, and then go to a Member on the majority side of the aisle.

I believe there is a consensus developing for the unanimous consent request I have proposed.

Ten minutes to the Senator from Texas on the FISA bill, 10 minutes in morning business for the Senator from Idaho, and then a member of the majority side will be recognized for whatever he or she wishes to do.

Mr. President, we have discussed this issue before on the floor. I urge my colleagues to vote against this amendment. As I have stated previously, the current bill, the Protect America Act, had a 6- month sunset on it only because we were not able to bring a full, complete FISA modernization bill to the floor, given the failure of Congress to act. We had been requested in April, May, June, and July to change the law. This is a bill that should establish a permanent operating authority for the intelligence community and the private partners who work with it.

As part of the compromise we reached in passing the bill, I did not believe we should have a sunset, but we agreed on a 6-year sunset. That was part of the deal. The 6-year sunset at least gives us certainty over the 6 years in time, that both the intelligence agencies, our private partners, and our allies abroad who depend upon us would have time to make this system work.

The problem we face is that any sunset withholds from our intelligence professionals and the private partners the certainty and the permanence they need to protect Americans from terrorism and other threats to national security.

Attorney General Mukasey has said there are no fatwahs with limitations by the terrorist leaders who seek to do us harm. They put out orders to keep trying to kill us, and these are not going to go away. There should be no sunset on this bill.

I disagree very strongly with my friend from Maryland that Congress is an important part of this. We passed a good bill that adds far more protections than Americans have ever had in intelligence collection. This bill is a good bill, but I can assure him that we have a strong bipartisan committee and a strong staff that will continue to oversee, supervise, and watch the surveillance to make sure it works. If we find it does not work, we should not wait for a 4-year sunset or a 6-year sunset. We should make those changes when they are needed.

We can see how long we have had to fight to get this authorization through. There was no action from the majority from April, May or June, until the very end of July. We put this bill out on the floor in October. We could not get the bill up in December because of filibusters. We had to get another 15-day extension so it would not expire.

We can act on the bill any time we need, but we cannot deprive our partners, our intelligence community, and our allies the protection if Congress cannot work.

I yield time to the distinguished chairman of the committee.

Mr. President, how much time do I have remaining?

Mr. President, this is a great nation because we have kept our country safe. We have kept our country safe, and we are working very closely with the intelligence community. That is why we have a good bill. The intelligence community says we must have the certainty at least of 6 years. I wanted to see none. That is why we came to an agreement in the Intelligence Committee and a 13-to-2 vote said we should have this bill with a 6-year sunset.

We have a solid bipartisan product addressing civil liberties concerns, while making sure the intelligence community has the tools and authorities it needs to keep us safe.

As I said, this was an important part of our compromise to get the bill through. Our intelligence collectors and troops on the battlefield need certainty, not rules that will expire in 4 years. That is why both the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General strongly oppose shortening the 6-year sunset in the bill.

I urge my colleagues to join me in opposing this amendment.

Mr. President, there is a 60-vote agreement on this.

Madam President, with the time so graciously allowed us by the proponents of this measure--and I know it was not intentional--I will only say a couple of quick things. No. 1, the courts are not precluded. The underlying bill, the bipartisan bill, permits lawsuits to go forward against the Government and the Government employees. No. 2, there was notification of the Big Eight--the ranking members and chairmen of the Intelligence Committees and the leaders--when this program was started. No. 3, article 2 does give the President the power to exercise foreign intelligence collections.

I would say to my colleague who has been on the Intelligence Committee, if he doesn't think Congress has been effective in overseeing programs, he has not seen the committee that is chaired by Senator Rockefeller and on which I ride shotgun with him. The Judiciary Committee--if it was not advised, the Judiciary Committee's primary responsibility is not intelligence. That is the Intelligence Committee. We get the sensitive information. We spend a great deal of time. We have reviewed it. We believe it is a disaster for our intelligence collection to have substitution because we would see our most sensitive means of collection exposed. The private parties that might have participated would be put through tremendous economic and commercial harm and subjected potentially to harassment, and perhaps even terrorist attacks, for having worked with us.

Therefore, I strongly urge that our colleagues defeat amendment No. 3927, the Specter-Whitehouse substitution amendment.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I have a friend. I have known him for a long time. His name is Steve Walther. Steve Walther was a very prominent Nevada lawyer, a senior partner in a law firm, with qualifications that are unsurpassed. I have always liked Steve very much. And he made a comfortable living. I called him once and said: Steve, have you ever considered doing something different?

A wonderful story about Steve, to show what a tremendously good guy he is. He has a little boy named Wyatt. Steve married a woman and he raised their children. They were his children once married, but he had never had his own child. His wife went to the doctor, and she was nearing 50 years old and was sick, and found out she was having a baby. So late in life they had this baby, and I will never forget what she said. She said: When I had my first two babies, time went by so slowly. But she said: Now I am older and understand, and I want everything to be fine, so I can't take enough time to make sure the baby is fine. And the baby is fine.

Anyway, I said to Steve: You could afford to come back here. How would you like to be a member of the Federal Election Commission? He is not a Democrat; he is an Independent. He has done things for decades with the American Bar Association, held all kinds of prominent positions with the American Bar Association nationally. He said: OK, I think it would be a good idea. Wyatt can come back and spend some time in Washington. So he served for nearly two years on the Federal Election Commission. Everybody said he was outstanding, as I knew he would be.

Also on that Federal Election Commission, prior to the first of the year, was another Democrat by the name of Bob Lenhard. He had served on the FEC with Steve. He and Steve worked well together. They worked well together with everybody on the Commission, and he and Steve did a good job.

The Federal Election Commission is critically important because it enforces our Nation's campaign finance laws. Both these nominees lost their jobs at the end of last year because the Republicans refused to permit a vote on their nominations to the FEC. They said they would not allow an up-or-down vote on these nominations of Lenhard and Walther. Nothing about their qualifications. They were both outstanding members of the Federal Election Commission. The reason they would not allow a vote on them is they would not allow a vote on their own nominee, a man by the name of Hans von Spakovsky. They are filibustering their own nominee.

I said: Let's vote on all of the FEC nominees, any order you want. We will vote on ours first, last, we don't care. Let's just have a vote on them. No. Unless we would guarantee von Spakovsky would pass, no. I don't know if Mr. Spakovsky would pass. I suspect the Republicans don't think so. But it seems fair to me that we should have votes on these nominees.

The record over the years is full of remarks by my Republican colleagues characterizing the up-or-down vote as the gold standard of reasonableness in Senate process. That is apparently not the view when it comes to one of their nominees, who would actually stand a chance of losing a vote. Republicans won't allow a vote on our Democrats unless we approve this person. That doesn't make sense.

The reason these FEC nominees, including Steve Walther, have not been approved rests squarely with the White House and the Republicans.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record two editorials.

Mr. President, I can gather one thing from the President's unwillingness to resolve the Federal Election Commission problem. That is that they would rather have no election watchdog in place during an election year.

The background on the FEC makes the call from Mr. Walther particularly remarkable. Listen to this, now. It even gets better.

Steve Walther called to tell me he had been invited to the White House by the President to push for his nomination. I got calls from other people whom I had placed in the works to get approved by the Senate. They were all invited to the White House tomorrow morning. All nominees that the President has pending were invited to the White House, Democrats and all. Why? To complain about the Democrats not approving them.

This leads me to tell you a little experience I have had, and we have all had, with this President. The President is in fact hoping to have breakfast with all the nominees, Democrats and Republicans, now pending in the Senate, in an effort to force the Senate to confirm all these people. They must live in some alternative universe. I talked yesterday about the Orwellian nature of this White House, and this is it. He has invited people to the White House to complain about our not approving them when they--the President and the White House--are the reason we are not approving many of them.

He invited Mr. Walther, Mr. Lenhard and other Democratic nominees to the White House, along with all his Republican nominees, to get them to be a backstop, a picture, so he can come out and give one of his Orwellian speeches that these people are not being approved because of the terrible Democrats in the Senate. Actually, we are waiting for him to allow us to have votes on a number of these nominees.

The President's breakfast only needed one attendee. Only one. That is because only one nominee matters to this President. It should be an intimate breakfast between President Bush and a man by the name of Steven Bradbury. Why do I say that? I say that because of all the nominees the President will profess to care about at this breakfast, Steven Bradbury stands head and shoulders above all the others in the President's esteem. I am not guessing; I was told so by the White House.

Right before the Christmas recess, I called the President's Chief of Staff, Mr. Bolten. A wonderful man; I like him; easy to talk to and easy to deal with. I said: I tell you what, Josh. We are going to go into recess, and why don't we have an agreement on who the President wants to have recess appointed and, in fact, I will give you some suggestions. You can have a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, you can have a Federal Aviation Agency, and you can have a couple of other Chemical Safety Board members. I said: Not only that, there are 84 other Republican nominees we will approve. There are 8 Democrats, 84 Republicans. Pretty good deal. He said: Let me check.

He called me back and he said: Well, what we want is to have a recess appointment of Steven Bradbury. I said: Josh, I didn't recall the name. Let me check. I checked with Chairman Leahy, I checked with Senator Durbin, who is a member of that committee, I checked with Senator Schumer, who is on that committee, and they and others said: You have to be kidding. This is a man who has written memos approving torture, and that is only the beginning.

Senator Durbin--I don't know if he has time today--will lay that out in more detail.

I called Josh back and I said: Josh, that man will never get approved. He has no credibility. He said: Well, let me check with the President. He called back and said: It is Bradbury or nobody. I said: You are willing to not allow 84 of your people to get approved because of this guy? He said: Yes, that is what the President wants.

Now there are 84 nominees, and among them somebody Secretary Chertoff wanted badly. Secretary Chertoff called me personally on someone and he said: You have to give us this person. We have important things to do here. If I don't get her, they will send me somebody from OMB, and that will be a person who doesn't know anything from anything. You have to help me with this.

The head of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, four Department of Defense assistant secretaries, the Deputy Director of the National Drug Control Policy, the Director of the Violence Against Women's Office, Assistant Attorney General, Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade, Director of the Census, Solicitor for the Department of Labor--these are only a handful of the jobs of the 84.

Now, these jobs, all Republicans, all names given up to us by the President, are jobs these people have sought for their whole lives. Head of the Census, head of the National Drug Control Policy, Director of Violence Against Women's Office, Solicitor for the Department of Labor. Nope, they are not going to have a job.

I thought about that. That was a decision the President made, willing to throw 84 people under the bus, run over them, for one person he knew he couldn't get. That is 84 plus the 4 he could recess appoint. So what we did, we stayed in session during the entire holiday recess. But before we went out, I thought to myself, I don't know these 84 people. Some of them I have met, but these are jobs that are important to our country, jobs that are important to these individuals and their families. I made the decision that because the President is willing to do what I think is so unfair, so unreasonable, that doesn't mean I am going to be unfair and unreasonable. So I called Secretary Chertoff and others and said: Just because your boss is unreasonable and unfair, I am not going to be that way. So I am going to walk out on the floor and approve every one of them, which we did. So for him to have that meeting tomorrow takes about as much gall as I can even imagine, to have a meeting where he brings in all the people who have not been approved. And had I not been, in my own words, generous, he would have had 84 more people he would have had to invite down there.

I can't imagine how he could invite Democrats down to the White House. Several of them are being blocked in this body by Republicans. Same goes for a number of Republican nominees. Democrats are willing to approve them and Republicans stand in the way. Why would he invite them down there also? But he did, because there is an Orwellian thought process that goes on down there saying Democrats aren't allowing these people to get approved, which is the direct opposite of the truth.

All for one person it appears, Mr. Bradbury. Whatever the White House wants, Bradbury would give it to them in a legal opinion. We are not going to accept that. What the President is trying to do with this show tomorrow is so unreasonable, so unfair, and so out of step with reality--as is the budget he gave us on Monday--that I hope the American people understand what is going on in this country.

It is too bad we have a situation where the President of the United States would have a meeting in the White House and invite everybody to say: I am sorry you are not going to be approved, it is their fault, when the truth is, it is his fault.

Now, here are the people we confirmed. They are right here. Everybody can see them. We confirmed all of them. And had it been up to the President, not a single one would have been confirmed.

Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote and table that motion.

Mr. President, 2LT Daniel K. Inouye distinguished himself by extraordinary heroism in action on April 21, 1945, in the vicinity of San Terenzo, Italy.

While attacking a defended ridge guarding an important road junction, Second Lieutenant Inouye skillfully directed his platoon through a hail of automatic weapons and small arms fire in a swift and enveloping movement that resulted in the capture of an artillery and mortar post and brought his men to within 40 yards of the hostile force.

Emplaced in bunkers and rock formations, the enemy halted the advance with crossfire from three machine guns. With complete disregard for his personal safety, Lieutenant Inouye crawled up the treacherous slope to within 5 yards of the nearest machine gun and hurled two grenades, destroying the emplacement.

Before the enemy could retaliate, he stood up and neutralized a second machine gun nest. Although wounded by a sniper's bullet, he continued to engage other hostile positions at close range until an exploding grenade shattered his right arm.

Despite the intense pain, he refused evacuation and continued to direct his platoon until enemy resistance was broken and his men were again deployed in defensive positions.

In the attack, 25 enemy soldiers were killed and 8 others were captured. By his gallant, aggressive tactics, and by his indomitable leadership, Lieutenant Inouye enabled his platoon to advance through formidable resistance and was instrumental in the capture of the ridge.

Lieutenant Inouye's extraordinary heroism and devotion to duty are in keeping with the highest traditions of military service and reflect great credit on him, his unit, and the U.S. Army.

Mr. President, Members of the Senate, these are the words that describe the actions of heroism of Senator Inouye, when, as a young man, he put his own safety aside for others. As a result of that he was awarded America's highest honor for gallantry and heroism, the Medal of Honor.

The reason I bring this to everyone's attention today is that we have a lot of new Senators. I want every one of them to know this man Dan Inouye is a man who was born to be a hero. He never thinks of himself but of others. In my 25-plus years in Congress, that is how I have found him to be.

I rise to express joy and honor for my friend and colleague Senator Inouye on the occasion of his 15,000th rollcall vote, which was just completed.

Dan Inouye was born to Japanese-American immigrants in Honolulu, the eldest of four children. Did he ever set an example--he sure did--for his siblings. On the day of the Pearl Harbor attack, with chaos reigning, and being only 17 years old, he volunteered to provide medical help to the injured, and there were a lot of injured. After high school, he wanted to become a medical doctor. At the time the U.S. Army banned Japanese Americans from becoming soldiers. The war broke out, but this ban was dropped, and as a teenager, Dan Inouye immediately put his medical ambition aside and signed up to serve his country in the military. Perhaps it was fate that Dan Inouye joined the legendary 442nd regimental combat team which in no small part, thanks to his bravery, became the most highly decorated unit in the history of the U.S. Army.

I can't improve the words of praise this great man earned upon receiving the Medal of Honor for his courageous service. I read that. But I think we all here recognize we serve with a very extraordinary human being. While he was recovering from his injuries--and it was more than his arm; his whole body was hurt and, as a result he spent years in a military hospital--in the military hospital, he met another wounded warrior, a man named Bob Dole. They recuperated together, both having severe arm injuries, among other things. The only injuries you could see with Senator Dole and Senator Inouye were the arms. But, of course, their injuries were much more severe than that. While there, Senator Dole told Senator Inouye, both to be Senators: I am going to run for Congress. Senator Inouye beat him there by a few years. That chance encounter began a lifetime of friendship that took these two wounded warriors from hospital beds in Battle Creek, MI, to seats in the Senate. The friendship and close working relationship they have shared is emblematic of Senator Inouye's lifelong commitment to bipartisanship in the pursuit of progress.

In his decades of public service, Senator Inouye has been a leader on issue after issue of concern to the American people. As chairman of the Subcommittee on Defense Appropriations, he is the leading expert and national advocate for national security, strengthening the military, and honoring our troops and veterans.

As the first person of Japanese descent to serve in the Senate, Dan Inouye is a soft-spoken trailblazer.

On a personal level, I was a very new Senator and he had made a commitment to do a fundraiser for me in Florida. He didn't know at the time he made this commitment that there would be other things that would be in the way of that. There was a little thing in the way, his wife's birthday. She understood. He understood. And he, because he had made a commitment, made the personal sacrifice and came down there. I have never forgotten that. That is why when he sought a leadership position in the Senate, I was the first to stand in line to support Senator Inouye. His heroism and extraordinary lifetime of public service are an inspiration to us all.

But on a personal note, Landra and I, and all my colleagues, are so happy and pleased to hear the recent news that Dan and Irene will be married this May. All of us in the Senate family wish them happiness and joy.