Floor Statements

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment and call up amendment No. 414.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. President, this amendment will raise the debt ceiling by $2.4 trillion. This will comply with the President's budget. Many on the other side asked for a clean vote on raising the debt ceiling. Because I really want to get along and go along, I want to make this vote available for those who wish to raise the debt ceiling.

I will vote ``no,'' but I wanted this to be under consideration.

Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. President, will the Senator yield for a question?

I am pleased today to come to the floor of the Senate to talk about the PATRIOT Act. I am pleased we have cracked open the door that will shed some light on the PATRIOT Act. I wish the door were open wider, the debate broader and more significant, but today we will talk a little bit about the constitutionality of the PATRIOT Act.

I was a cosponsor of Senator Leahy's amendment, and I think it would have gone many great steps forward to make sure we have surveillance on what our government does. It would have authorized audits by the inspector general to continue to watch over and to make sure government is not invading the rights of private citizens, and I do support that wholeheartedly.

Jefferson said if we had a government of angels, we wouldn't have to care or be concerned about the power that we give to government. Unfortunately, sometimes we don't have angels in charge of our government. Sometimes we can even get a government in charge that would use the power of government in a malicious or malevolent way, to look at the banking records of people they disagree with politically, to look at the religious practices of people they disagree with. So it is important that we are always vigilant, that we are eternally vigilant of the powers of government so they do not grow to such an extent that government could be looking into our private affairs for nefarious reasons.

We have proposed two amendments that we will have votes on today. One of them concerns the second amendment. I think it is very important that we protect the rights of gun owners in our country, not only for hunting but for self-protection, and that the records of those in our country who own guns should be secret. I don't think the government, well intentioned or not well intentioned, should be sifting through millions of records of gun owners. Why? There have been times even in our history in which government has invaded our homes to take things from us. In the 1930s, government came into our households and said give us your gold. Gold was confiscated in this country in 1933. Could there conceivably be a time when government comes into our homes and says, We want your guns?

People say that is absurd. That would never happen. I hope that day never comes. I am not accusing anybody of being in favor of that, but I am worried about a government that is sifting through millions of records without asking: Are you a suspect; without asking, are you in league with foreign terrorists? Are you plotting a violent overthrow of your government? By all means, if you are, let's look at your records. Let's put you in jail. Let's prosecute you. But let's not sift through hundreds of millions of gun records to find out whether you own a gun. Let's don't leave those data banks in the hands of government where someday those could be abused.

What we are asking for are procedural protections. The Constitution gave us those protections. The second amendment gives us the right to keep and bear arms. The fourth amendment is equally important. It gives us the right to be free of unreasonable search. It gives us the right to say that government must have probable cause. There must be at least some suspicion that one is committing a crime before they come into one's house or before they go into one's records, wherever one's records are. The Constitution doesn't say that one only has protection of records that are in one's house. One should have protection of records that reside in other places. Just because one's Visa record resides with a Visa company doesn't make it any less private. If we look at a person's Visa bill, we can find out all kinds of things about them. If we look at a person's Visa bill, we can find out what doctors they go to; do they go to a psychiatrist; do they have mental illness; what type of medications do they take.

If someone looked at my Visa bill, they could tell what type of books or magazines I read. One of the provisions of the PATRIOT Act is called the library provision. They can look at the books someone checks out in the library. People say, well, still, a judge has to sign these warrants. But we changed the standard. The standard of the fourth amendment was probable cause. They had to argue, or at least convince a judge, that you were a suspect, that you were doing something wrong. Now the cause or the standard has been changed to relevance. So it could be that you went to a party with someone who was from Palestine who gives money to some group in Palestine that may well be a terrorist group. But the thing is, because I went to a party with them, because I know that person, am I now somehow connected enough to be relevant? They would say, Well, your government would never do that. They would never go to investigate people. The problem is, this is all secret. So I do not know if I have been investigated. My Visa bill sometimes has been $5,000. Sometimes we pay for them over the phone, which is a wire transfer. Have I been investigated by my government? I do not know. It is secret.

What I want is protection. I want to capture terrorists, sure. If terrorists are moving machine guns and weapons in our country, international terrorists, by all means, let's go after them. But the worst people, the people we want to lock up forever--the people all of us universally agree about: people who commit murder, people who commit rape--we want to lock them up and

throw away the book, and I am all with you. But we still have the protections of the fourth amendment.

If someone is running around in the streets of Washington tonight--at 4 in the morning--and we think they may have murdered someone, we will call a judge, and we will get a warrant. Just because we believe in procedural protections, just because we believe in the Constitution does not mean we do not want to capture terrorists. We just want to have some rules.

I will give you an analogy. Right now, you have been to the airport. Most of America has been to the airport at some point in time in the last year or two. Millions of people fly every day. But we are taking this shotgun approach. We think everyone is a terrorist, so everyone is being patted down, everyone is being strip-searched. We are putting our hands inside the pants of 6-year-old children. I mean, have we not gone too far? Are we so afraid that we are willing to give up all of our liberty in exchange for security? Franklin said: If you give up your liberty, you will have neither. If you give up your liberty in exchange for security, you may well wind up with neither.

Because we take this shotgun approach, we take this approach that everyone is a potential terrorist, I think we actually are doing less of a good job in capturing terrorists because if we spent our time going after those who were committing terrorism, maybe we would spend less time on those who are living in this country, children and otherwise, frequent business travelers, who are not a threat to our country. Instead of wasting time on these people, we could spend more time on those who would attack us.

I will give you an example--the Underwear Bomber. For goodness' sakes, his dad reported him. His dad called the U.S. Embassy and said: My son is a potential threat to your country. We did nothing. He was on a watch list. We still let him get on a plane. He had been to Nigeria. He had been to Yemen twice. For goodness' sakes, why don't we take half the people in the TSA who are patting down our children and let's have them look at the international flight manifest of those traveling from certain countries who could be attacking us? For goodness' sakes, why don't we target whom we are looking at?

My other amendment concerns banking records. Madam President, 8 million banking records have been looked at in our country--not by the government. They have empowered your bank to spy on you. Every time you go into your bank, your bank is asked to spy on you. If you make a transaction of more than $5,000, the bank is encouraged to report you. If the bank does not report you, they get a large fine, to the tune of $100,000 or more. They could get 5 years in prison. They are overencouraged. The incentive is for the bank to report everyone. So once upon a time, these suspicious-activity reports were maybe 10,000 in a year. There are now over 1 million of these suspicious-activity reports.

Do I want to capture terrorists? Yes. Do I want to capture terrorists who are transferring large amounts of money? Yes. But you know what. When we are wasting time on 8 million transactions--the vast majority of these transactions being by law-abiding U.S. citizens--we are not targeting the people who would attack us.

Let's do police work. If there are terrorist groups in the Middle East and we know who they are, let's investigate them. If they have money in the United States or they are transferring it between banks, by all means, let's investigate them. But let's have some constitutional protections. Let's have some protections that say you must ask a judge for a warrant.

Some have said: How would we get these people? Would we capture those who are transferring weapons? We would investigate. We have all kinds of tools, and we have been using those tools.

Others have said: Well, we have captured these people through the PATRIOT Act, and we never could have gotten them. The problem with that argument is that it is unprovable. You can tell me you captured people through the PATRIOT Act and I can believe you captured them and you have prosecuted them, but you cannot prove to me you would not have captured them had you asked for a judge.

We have a special court. It is called the FISA Court. The FISA Court has been around since the late 1970s. Not one warrant was ever turned down before the PATRIOT Act. But they say: We need more power. We need more power given to these agencies, and we do not need any constitutional restraint anymore.

But my question is, the fourth amendment said you had to have probable cause. You had to name the person and the place. Well, how do we change, get rid of probable cause and change it to a standard of relevance? How do we do that and amend the Constitution without actually amending the Constitution? These are important constitutional questions. But when the PATRIOT Act came up, we were so frightened by 9/11 that it just flew through here. There were not enough copies to be read. There was one copy at the time. No Senator read the PATRIOT Act. It did not go through the standard procedure.

Let's look at what is happening now. Ten years later, you would think the fear and hysteria would have gotten to such a level that we could go through the committee process. Senator Leahy's bill went to committee. It was deliberated upon. It was discussed. It was debated. It was passed out with bipartisan support. It came to the floor with bipartisan support. But do you know why it is not getting a vote now? Because they have backed us up against a deadline.

There have been people who have implied in print that if I hold up the PATRIOT Act and they attack us tonight, then I am responsible for the attack. There have been people who have implied that if some terrorist gets a gun, then I am somehow responsible. It is sort of the analogy of saying that because I believe you should get a warrant before you go into a potential or alleged murderer's house, somehow I am in favor of murder.

I am in favor of having constitutional protections. These arose out of hundreds of years of common law. They were codified in our Constitution because we were worried. We were incredibly concerned about what the King had done. We were concerned about what a far distant Parliament was doing to us without our approval. We were concerned about what James Otis called writs of assistance. Writs of assistance were pieces of paper that were warrants that were written by soldiers. They were telling us we had to house the British soldiers in our houses, and they were giving general warrants which meant: We are just going to search you willy-nilly. We are not going to name the person or the place. We are not going to name the crime you are accused of.

If a government were comprised of angels, we would not need the fourth amendment. What I argue for here now is protections for us all should we get a despot, should we someday elect somebody who does not have respect for rights. We should obey rules and laws.

Is this an isolated episode we are here talking about, the PATRIOT Act, and that there is an insufficient time, that it is a deadline: Hurry, hurry; we must act. It is not an isolated time.

We have had no sufficient debate on the war with Libya. We are now encountered in a war in Libya, so we now have a war in which there has been no congressional debate and no congressional vote. But do you know what they argue. They say it is just a little war. But you know what. It is a big principle. It is the principle that we as a country elect people. It is a principle that we are restrained by the Constitution, that you are protected by the Constitution, and that if I ask the young men and women here today to go to war and say we are going to go to war, there darn well should be a debate in this body. We are abdicating those responsibilities.

We are not debating the PATRIOT Act sufficiently. We are not having an open amendment process. It took me 3 days of sitting down here filibustering, but I am going to get two amendment votes. I am very happy and I am pleased we came together to do that. I wish we would do more. I wish Senator Leahy's bill was being voted on here on the floor. I wish there were a week's worth of debate.

The thing is, we come here to Washington expecting these grand debates. I have been here 4 months. I expected

that the important questions of the day would be debated back and forth. Instead, what happens so often is the votes are counted and recounted and laboriously counted. When they know they can beat me or when they know they can beat somebody else, then they allow the vote to come to the floor. But some, like Senator Leahy's bill--I am suspicious that it is not going to be voted on because they may not be able to beat it. I support it.

So the question is, Should we have some more debate in our country? We have important issues pressing on us. I have been here for 4 months, and I am concerned about the future of our country because of the debt burden, because of this enormous debt we are accumulating. But are we debating it fully? Are we talking about ways we could come together, how Republicans and Democrats, right and left, could come together to figure out this crisis of debt? No. I think we are so afraid of debate but particularly with the PATRIOT Act.

The thing with the PATRIOT Act is that it is so emotional because anyone who stands up, like myself, and says we need to have protections for our people, that we should not sift through the records of every gun owner in America, looking and just trolling through records-- interestingly, we have looked at 28 million electronic records, when the inspector general looked at this--28 million electronic records. We have looked at 1,600,000 texts. If you said to me: Well, they asked a judge, and they thought these were terrorists, I do not have a problem. The judge gives them a warrant, and they look at these text messages or electronic records. But do you want them trolling through your Facebook? Do you want them trolling through your e-mails? Do you want a government that is unrestrained by law?

This ultimately boils down to whether we believe in the rule of law. So often we give lipservice to it on our side and the other side, and everybody says: We believe in the Constitution and the rule of law. When you need to protect the rule of law is when it is most unpopular. When everybody tells you that you are unpatriotic or you are for terrorism because you believe in the Constitution, that is when it is most precious, that is when it is that you need to stand up and say no.

We can fight. We can preserve our freedoms. We are who we are because of our freedoms and our individual liberty. If we give that up, we are no different from those whom we oppose. Those who wish to destroy our country want to see us dissolved from within. We dissolve from within when we give up our liberties. We need to stand and be proud of the fact that in our country it is none of your darn business what we are reading. It is none of your business where we go to see a doctor, what movie we see, or what our magazines are. It is nobody's business here in Washington what we are doing. If they think it is the business of law enforcement, get a warrant. Prove to somebody--at least have one step that says that person is doing something suspicious.

The thing is, these suspicious-activity reports--8 million of them have been filed in the last 8 years. The government does not have to ask for this; it is sort of like they have deputized the banks. The banks have now become sort of like police agencies. The banks are expected to know what is in the Bank Secrecy Act. They are expected to know thousands of pages of regulations. But do you know what they tell your bank. If you do not report everybody, if you do not report these transactions, we will fine you, we will put you in jail, or we will put you out of business.

That is a problem. It is a real problem that that is what has come of this. I think we need to have procedural protections.

Madam President, if at this point there is a request from the Senator from Illinois to yield for a question or a comment, I would be happy to, if it is about the PATRIOT Act.

OK. The amendments I will be proposing will be about two things, and we will have votes on them. We have been given the time to debate, which I am glad we fought for. We will basically be given a virtually insurmountable hurdle. This will be maybe the first time in recent history I remember seeing this, but they will move to table my amendments. In order for me to defeat the tabling motion, I will have to have 60 votes. It is similar to the votes we have when you have to overcome a cloture vote or you have to overcome a filibuster. But we really are not having any vote where there is a possibility of me winning. There is really a forgone conclusion. The votes are counted in advance.

I am proud of the fact that I fought for, though, and we got some debate on the floor and that maybe in bringing this fight, the country will consider and reconsider the PATRIOT Act. But we need to have more debate. Senator Leahy's bill needs to be fully debated and needs to come out. Maybe when there is not a deadline, maybe it will come forward. Maybe we can have some discussion.

But I guess most of my message is that we should not be fearful. We should not be fearful of freedom. We should not be fearful of individual liberty. And they are not mutually exclusive. You do not have to give up your liberty to catch criminals. You can catch criminals and terrorists and protect your liberty at the same time. There is a balancing act. But what we did in our hysteria after 9/11 was we did not do any kind of balancing act. We just said: Come and get it. Here is our freedom, come and get it. We do not care whether there is review in Congress. We do not care whether there is to be an inspector general looking at this.

One of my colleagues today reported: Well, there is no evidence those 8 million banking investigations are bothering or doing anything to innocent people. Well, there is a reason for there being no evidence: They are secret. You are not told if your bank has been spying on you. If your bank has put in a suspicious-activity report, you are not informed of that.

So the bottom line is, just because there is no complaint does not mean there have not been abuses. There is something called national security letters. These are written by officers of the law, by FBI agents. There is no review by judges. There have been 200,000 of these. There has been an explosion of these national security letters, and we do not know whether they are being abused because they are a secret.

In fact, here is how deep the secret goes. When the PATRIOT Act was originally passed, you were not allowed to tell your lawyer. If the government came to you with an FBI agent's request, you could not even tell your lawyer. This, is very disturbing. They finally got around to changing that. But you know what. If I had an Internet service, if I am a server and they come to me with a policeman's request, and they say: Give us your records--if I tell anyone other than my attorney, I can go to jail for 5 years.

What we have is a veil of secrecy. So even if the government is abusing the powers, we will never know. How much time remains?

Does the Senator from Illinois wish to interject?

I will finish up then. As we go forward on these, I would hope there would be some deliberation and that the vote, as it goes forward, people will think about that we need to balance our freedoms with our security. I think we all want security. Nobody wants what happened on 9/11 to happen again.

But I think we do not need to simplify the debate to such an extent that we simply say we have to give up our liberties. For example, I cannot tell you how many times people have come up to me in Washington, unelected officials, and said: We could have gotten Moussaoui, the 19th hijacker, if we had the PATRIOT Act.

The truth is, we did not capture Moussaoui because we had poor police work. Ask yourself: Did we fire anybody after 9/11? We gave people gold medals. We gave them medals of honor for their intelligence work after 9/11. To my knowledge, not one person was fired.

Do you think we were doing a good job before 9/11? We had the 19th hijacker in prison, in custody for a

month before 9/11. We had his computer. When they looked at Moussaoui's computer 4 days after 9/11 or the day after 9/11, they connected all of the dots to most of the hijackers and to people in Pakistan.

Why did we not look at his computer? Was it because we did not have the prerogative? They did not ask. An FBI agent in Minnesota wrote 70 letters to his superiors saying: Ask for a warrant. His superiors did not ask for a warrant. Do you think we should have done something about that after 9/11?

We gave everybody in the FBI and the CIA medals. We gave the leaders medals for meritorious service, and no one blinked an eye. What did we do? We passed the PATRIOT Act and said: Come and take our liberties. Make us safe. But to make us safe, we should not give up our rights to protect what we read, to protect what we view, to protect where we go and who we associate with. We should not allow governments to troll willy-nilly through millions of records.

You have heard of wireless wiretaps. A lot of these things are unknown because they are so secret that nobody knows. Even many of us do not even know the extent of these things. But I can tell you, there is a great deal of evidence that we were looking at millions of records and that millions of innocent U.S. citizens are having their records looked at.

Now, are we doing anything? Are we imprisoning innocent folks? No, I do not think we are doing that. I think they are good people. I think the people I have met in the FBI, the people I have met in our government want to do the right thing. But what I am fearful of is that there comes a time when we have given up these powers--for example, the constitutional discussion over war.

If we say: Well, Libya is just a small war. We do not care. We say Congress has no say in this. What happens when we get a President who decides to send 1 million troops into war and we simply say: Who cares. You know, we let the President do whatever he has to do because he has unlimited powers.

We fought a war, we fought long and hard to restrict--we wanted an Executive that was bound by the chains of the Constitution. We wanted a Presidency, an executive branch that was bound by the checks and balances. That is what our Constitution is about. It is about debate. Debate is important. Amendments are important. Bringing forward something from committee that would have reformed the PATRIOT Act is incredibly important, to have those debates on the floor of the Senate.

That is why there is a certain amount of disappointment to having arrived in Washington and to see the fear of debate of the Constitution, and that we need to be debating these things. We need to have full amendments.

Can there be any excuse why the inspector general should not be reviewing other agencies of government to find out if our rights are being trampled upon.

So I would ask, in conclusion, as these amendments come forward, that people think about it. Think about our constitutional protections. But do not go out and say the Senator from Kentucky does not want to capture terrorists or the Senator from Kentucky wants people to have guns and to attack us because the thing is, we can have reasonable philosophical debates about this, but we need to be having an open debate process. We need to talk about the constitutional protections, the provisions that protect us all, and we need to be aware of that.

I tell people: You cannot protect the second amendment if you do not believe in the fourth amendment. You cannot protect the second amendment if you do not believe in the first amendment. It is all incredibly important.

I hope as we go forward on this vote, and even though I will likely fail, because of the way the rules are set up on the vote, I hope as we go forward that at least somebody will begin to discuss this, somebody will begin to discuss where we should have some constitutional restraint; that Senator Leahy will have a chance to bring his bill forward, and that there will be a full and open debate.

I hope we have cracked the door open and I have been a small part of that.

I yield back my time.

The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Klobuchar.) The Senator from Illinois.

Madam President, I am happy to yield back the remainder of my time.

Mr. President, I come to the floor today to speak about the PATRIOT Act. I think it is a shame we are not going to be debating or having any votes on this act, particularly since it was promised by our leadership.

I would like at this time to yield the floor to my good friend, the Senator from New Mexico, if he would like to make a few remarks.

I thank the Senator for his comments. I think what this shows is that it is a bipartisan effort that says we should protect our Constitution. Those on the left and those on the right who believe in the Constitution believe it should be protected. That brings together some of us who may not necessarily agree on all other issues, but when it comes to the Constitution, when it comes to the basic Bill of Rights, we are concerned both on the right and left, on the Democratic and the Republican side. The problem is that those of us who are concerned with the Constitution are in the minority of both sides, so we are being quieted down, we are being told to sit quietly in the back of the room and don't make waves. We want to have a debate over the PATRIOT Act because we are concerned about our liberties. We are all concerned about terrorism too, but we don't think you have to give up your liberties in order to combat terrorism.

On February 15, we extended the PATRIOT Act for 90 days. During that time and on the Senate floor on February 15, we were promised a week of debate, and we were promised an open amendment process. We are now amidst a process where we will have no debate and no amendments. Do we fear terrorism so much that we will not have debate? Do we fear terrorism so much that we throw out our Constitution and are unwilling and afraid to debate our Constitution? I think it is a sad day that we can't do that. Are Senators afraid to vote on the issues of the day, afraid to debate the Constitution, afraid to have an open forum and debate whether the PATRIOT Act is constitutional? I think this does a great disservice to the voters.

They talk about this being the world's most deliberative body. We are unwilling to deliberate. We are unwilling to have questions broached as to whether the PATRIOT Act is unconstitutional. We have had 99 days since we extended it, 43 days in session, and we have had 56 votes. What does that mean in the context of things? We are setting a record for the least amount of votes ever to occur in the Senate. There are some important questions we should be debating, but unless it is a forgone conclusion, unless they have counted the votes and decided the outcome before we have the debate, we are precluded from debating.

Wendell Phillips, the great abolitionist, wrote, ``Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.'' The PATRIOT Act is a perfect example of how a lack of vigilance leads to loss of liberty.

In the aftermath of 9/11, we amended the Constitution with the PATRIOT Act. You say: Whoa, we didn't have an amendment to the Constitution, did we? We did not do it the way we are supposed to, but we did in reality amend the Constitution with the PATRIOT Act. How did this happen? We were fearful. Mr. President, 9/11 had happened, and we wanted to stop terrorism. All of us want that, but do we have to give up our constitutional liberties in order to do that?

How did the PATRIOT Act change the Constitution? How did the PATRIOT Act change the fourth amendment? In the fourth amendment, it says:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons,

houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches

and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall

issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or

affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be

searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The PATRIOT Act changed this. The PATRIOT Act changed the standard from probable cause, which is a longstanding position and standard within the courts which limits the police from coming into your house unless there is probable cause that you have either committed a crime or are in the act of committing a crime--we changed this to a standard we now call relevance. But that is changing the Constitution.

How do you change the Constitution by majority vote? It is supposed to be a supermajority in both bodies. Then it is to go back and be ratified by three-fourths of the States. It is supposed to be difficult to change the Constitution, difficult to amend the Constitution. Why? Because we thought some of these rights were so important that we should not allow a majority to change them. Those of us who own guns and believe in gun ownership think the second amendment is protected from a simple majority taking away the second amendment. Likewise, the first amendment--those of us who prize the ability of the press to print and to respond and to hold beliefs, however unpopular, those of us who wish to have a country in which religion is not hampered and we can say what we believe and not have it hampered by the government, we don't believe a majority should take away these rights.

But a majority did take away part of the fourth amendment because we changed the standard of the fourth amendment from probable cause to relevance. So if they want to look at your records, they just have to say it is relevant. They don't have to say you are a terrorist. They don't have to say you are a foreigner. They don't have to say you are conspiring with anyone. They just have to say they have some interest in your library records.

How often is this going on? There is something called suspicious activity reports. Some of this was started before the PATRIOT Act, some of it is separate from the PATRIOT Act, but much of it was emboldened by the PATRIOT Act. The suspicious activity reports are where your bank spies on you. You may not know this is happening, you may not even know if they have spied on you, and they probably won't tell you. But if you made a transaction that involved more than $5,000, you could well have been spied on by your bank and reported to the government.

Some people say: I am not doing anything wrong; I don't care if they look at my records. Here is the thing: If you look at my visa bill, you can tell what doctors I go to. If I see a psychiatrist and I don't want everybody to know it, that may be on my Visa bill these days. What magazines I read is on my Visa bill, what books I order from Amazon or another bookseller from the Internet, whether I drink alcohol, whether I gamble. There is a lot about your life that is involved in your financial records, and I think they do deserve protection and we do deserve a standard where we don't say, well, it might be relevant, or, we might just want to troll through all these records to see if anybody might be committing a crime.

This one is even worse than many of the other aspects because the suspicious activity reports do not begin with the government asking any questions. They tell your bank to watch you. Your bank is to watch you and to watch all of your transactions and to report to the government. So they have force.

You say: Maybe they are only reporting terrorists. Since 2001, since 9/11, 8

million suspicious activity reports--8 million--have been filed. Over 1 million of these are filed a year. The thing is, you could well ask for a Freedom of Information Act inquiry and ask whether you have been investigated by your government for your transactions.

My point is this is an invasion of your privacy. It does not have any judicial restraint upon it. And the other thing is, it may not even be good for finding terrorists. It may be they are getting so much information they cannot even read or listen to all the information. It is kind of like what they are doing at the airports. Because they insist everybody be searched and everybody be patted down, we are patting down 6-year-olds. A little girl in my town--her dad is a physician and practiced with me at my same practice--was patted down where they are putting their hands inside her pants. This is absurd--6- year-old girls.

The thing is, by doing that, they are wasting time on people who will not be attacking us and spending less time on people who will be attacking us. It is the same with banking records. If they are looking at your banking records, they do not have the time to spend looking at records of people who possibly would be attacking us. Eight million records have been looked at--no judge's order, no judicial review. This one is not even reviewed by anybody in government. They are giving this power carte blanche to banks, and they are telling the banks: If you do not spy on your customer, you will be fined. They estimate that $7 billion a year is spent by banks complying with this order to spy on their customers.

The thing is, we are having trouble in our economy. The banks are struggling. The economy is struggling. We are having trouble with jobs. And yet we are going to add $7 billion of costs onto the banks to spy on their customers.

Might there be an occasion where a bank transfer or bank activity could be a terrorist activity? Yes. If we are investigating those, let's ask for a warrant. You say: It will be too slow. We never get it. Warrants are almost never denied. There is a special court set up for the investigation of intelligence. It is called the FISA Court. It has been around since the 1970s. Before the PATRIOT Act, the FISA Court never turned down a warrant.

You say: These people are awful; we have to get them off the street. It doesn't matter, I don't want any restraint; I just want it done.

Unfortunately, that has been the attitude of the people up here and a majority of people after 9/11. The people were so frightened that they said: Do anything, I don't care.

The problem with that attitude is, even if you want to argue that has not been abused yet, what happens when people are elected to your government who decide they do not like your religion or you believe in a certain kind of marriage, and you want to say this and they want to investigate you? There is no step to stop that. There is no step to say: Your church believes in this unorthodox belief or this belief that we do not call politically correct or it is no longer acceptable, but we want to investigate the banking records of the church and see if we can take away their IRS number or tax exemption. If you do not have any restraint to these activities, someday we will get a government that has no restraint and then goes forward to say: We want to get that church shut down because that church is saying something we disagree with or these people are reading these books we do not like.

This goes across the party aisle. The Library Association is concerned with this also, that people's books are being looked at. Think about it. Do you want the government to know what books you read? Do you want to be on a watchlist because of the books you read?

They say: Oh, there are provisions. We have made provisions. That will not happen.

The only way you have a real provision or protection is if you have procedural steps that say someone must review this before it happens.

If we have someone who we think is terrible and they need to be off the streets, if they are accused of rape, accused of murder, accused of robbery, accused of the most heinous crimes we can think of, and it is 2 in the morning, we call a judge and we get a warrant. It is almost never turned down. But it is one step removed from the police breaking down every door of every person they suspect and not having any kind of discussion with someone who has a level head, who is not part of the investigation.

Many up here will say we are in grave danger. If the PATRIOT Act expires, all things could happen and terrorism could break loose. What they are arguing, though, is that there is a scenario where we would not get warrants to investigate terrorism. That never existed. Before the PATRIOT Act, we were not turning down these warrants.

Some have argued that Moussaoui, the 19th hijacker--he was captured a month in advance of 9/11--many have said that if we only had the PATRIOT Act, we could have gotten him. That is untrue. There is a provision called the lone wolf provision in the PATRIOT Act, but we did not get Moussaoui because we did not do our job. We did not communicate well. The superiors to the officers and the FBI agents in the field did not even ask for a warrant. They turned down a request for a warrant without even asking the FISA Court for it.

We have the 19th hijacker a month in advance. We have his computer. When we do look at his computer on 9/12, we link him very quickly, within a matter of hours, to all the other hijackers. It is easy in hindsight to say we could have stopped 9/11, but to tell you the truth, we have to look at the rules and say: Could we possibly have gotten that information? The answer is yes.

The FBI agent in Minnesota wrote 70 letters to his superiors. The FBI was told that Moussaoui was possibly an agent of terrorism. The French Government confirmed it. That was all we needed. With that information, had they gone to the FISA Court, they would have gotten a warrant. When the 9/11 Commission report came out, they acknowledged as much. Moussaoui's warrant, in all likelihood, would not have been turned down, and there is a possibility we would have stopped it.

The suspicious activity reports are particularly galling because they are businesses that are forced to spy on their citizens. There is another form of spying that goes on as well. These are called national security letters. These are like warrants. They go after your banking records, such as the suspicious activity reports, but they are a little more targeted in the sense that the government is asking for an NSL. But it is not a judge who asks for an NSL. The person who asks for an NSL is an FBI agent, essentially a police or law enforcement agent. The danger here is that we have removed the step where the police officer or the FBI agent would then ask for permission from a judge. That is my problem with these national security letters.

Some say: We are not doing that many of them. Initially, we were not. Now we have done over 200,000 national security letters. One of my reforms, if it were to take place, would be to ask judges to review these. I see no reason why they should not review them.

Some have said: You have no expectation of privacy. The courts have already ruled that you have no expectation of privacy in your papers or electronic records. This is the way it has been interpreted, but I think it has been misinterpreted. I think it has been interpreted that your banking records do not deserve privacy when they are not in your house, and I think it is an incorrect interpretation of the fourth amendment. The fourth amendment says that in your papers, you are to be protected. It does not specify those papers are in your possession or in someone else's.

At this time, I yield the floor to my good friend from South Carolina.

Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. President, not only are we not debating the PATRIOT Act, but does the Senator from South Carolina think we have given sufficient floor time to amendments and proposals as to how to deal with the debt problem?

Mr. President, one other question is, we will not all agree necessarily on the PATRIOT Act. The thing is, even for those who feel it is important it not expire, why would they not consent to some debate? I have asked for three amendments, three votes. We could do them in the next hour. We could debate and have this time and there would be no expiration of the PATRIOT Act for those who think it expiring is a problem.

Mr. President, I do not quite grasp why they are so fearful of debate and fearful of votes, that they are willing to let the PATRIOT Act expire to prevent debate and prevent votes. The sticking point turns out to be an amendment basically on preventing gun records from being sifted through under the PATRIOT Act. People say: Well, what if someone--a terrorist--is selling guns illegally? Couldn't we get them? Yes, we could get them the way we get everybody else: Ask the judge for a warrant. Judges routinely do not turn down warrants. It worked for us for 225 years, until the PATRIOT Act, when we had a process, the fourth amendment, protecting us from an overzealous government. But it also worked to catch criminals.

At this time I yield the floor temporarily to my good friend from Utah.

When we look at this debate and we talk about exactly where we should go from here and why it is important, it is important to look at the PATRIOT Act and say to ourselves: How do we protect our Constitution if we are not willing to protect all parts of it? So many conservatives are avid for the second amendment. I am one of them. I want to protect the second amendment. But I tell those who want to protect the second amendment that they can't protect the second amendment if they don't believe in the first amendment. If they don't believe in the first amendment, they can't have that voice that it will take. If they want to place limitations on groups that advocate gun ownership under the second amendment, that will limit the second amendment. But, likewise, they cannot protect the second amendment if they don't believe in the fourth amendment.

There is no reason we should allow a government to look at our gun records and to troll through all of them. If a government thinks someone is a terrorist, name that person, name the place, and show probable cause. Do we want to allow government to troll through our records? The government has looked at 28 million electronic records--28 million. They are just sifting through all of our records looking for what. I want them to catch terrorists, but I want them to look at the Constitution with some restraint to say this person is a terrorist or we suspect him to be so, for this reason. We need not be so frightened that we give up our liberty in exchange for security.

Some would say our government is full of good people who would say: I have not done anything wrong, and I don't have to worry about it. We are not worried about good government; we are worried about bad government. Jefferson said once upon a time if all men were angels, we would have no concern for constitutional restraint. But there have been times in our history and in the history of other countries where unsavory characters, where despotic characters have won election.

When Hitler was first elected in the 1920s and early 1930s, he was elected popularly. The thing is, they were so mad and upset over World War I that they basically traded. They said: We want a strong leader. Give us a strong leader. But if we have rules that allow that strong leader to grab and do things, that is the real danger. At a minimum now, the danger is--it is a great danger to us if we allow this to go on if we get a despotic government at some point in time.

We are not worried about good people in government. We are worried about people who might be elected who would abuse these powers. It has happened. Look at what happened during certain administrations where people looked at IRS records of enemies. Look at what is happening now where the executive branch is looking at donor records for those who do business with government. If you are a contractor and you do business with government, they want to know who you donate to.

There are dangers to allowing the government to snoop through our records. It doesn't mean we don't want to stop crime, we don't want to stop terrorism. It means we need to have a rule of law, and we need to pay attention to the rule of law.

We proposed several amendments. One of them went through the Judiciary Committee. It was deliberated. It was amended. It was passed with bipartisan support, but we won't get a vote on it. It disappoints me that they are afraid to debate this on the Senate floor, and we will get no vote on amendments that were offered seriously to try to reform the PATRIOT Act to take away some of the abuses of it.

We offered three amendments to the PATRIOT Act. One was on the gun records. That apparently unhinged people who are afraid of voting on any gun issues. Because of that, we are all going to be denied any debate or votes.

Some will say: Oh, you are going to keep your colleagues here until 1 in the morning. Well, I think when they are here tonight at 1 in the morning, maybe they will think a little bit about why they are here and why we had no debate and why we had the power to have the debate at any point in time. I have agreed and said we can have a vote on the PATRIOT Act in an hour or 2 hours. We could have had a vote on the PATRIOT Act yesterday. But I want debate, and I want amendments. I think that is the very least the American people demand and this body demands, that there be open and deliberate debate about the PATRIOT Act.

One of our other amendments has to do with destroying records. Some of these records they take from us through the bank spying on us, or the government spying on us, are not destroyed. I think these records should be destroyed at some point in time.

For goodness' sakes, if you are not a terrorist, why are they keeping these records? There ought to be rules on the destruction of these records if you are not a terrorist and they are not going to prosecute you.

The fourth amendment says we should name the place and the person. We have one wiretap called the John Doe. They don't name the place or the person, and they are not required to. I think we should. Now, are there times when it might be a terrorist when we say, well, we don't want to name the person? We don't have to name them in public. We could name them to the FISA commission. I do not object to them being named and the name being redacted, but the name should be presented to the judge who is making the decision. I want a judge to make a decision.

James Otis--part of our revolution--for the 20 years leading up to the American Revolution, there was a debate about warrants. They issued what were called writs of assistance. They are also called general warrants. They weren't specific. They didn't say what crime one was being accused of, and the soldiers came into our houses. They would lodge soldiers in our houses, and they would enter into our houses without warrants. The fourth amendment was a big deal. We had passed the fourth amendment, and it was one of the primary grievances of our Founding Fathers.

I don't think we should give up so easily. I don't think we should be cowed by fear and so fearful of attack that we give up our liberties. If we do, we become no different than the rest of the countries that have no liberties. Our liberties are what make us different from other countries. The fact that we protect the rights, even of those accused of a crime--people say, well, gosh, a murderer will get a trial. Yes, they will get a trial because we don't know they are a murderer until we convict them. We want procedural restraints.

People say: You would give procedural restraints for terrorists? I would say at the very least, a judge has to give permission before we get records. The main reason is because we are not asking for 10 records or 20 records or 40 records of people connected to terrorism. We are asking for millions of records.

There are people in this room today who have had their records looked at. It is difficult to find out because what happens--here is the real rub, and this is how fearful they were. When the PATRIOT Act was passed shortly after 9/11, they were so fearful that they said: If a letter, a demand letter, a national security letter asks for records, you are not allowed to tell your attorney. You were gagged. If you told your attorney, they could put you in jail for 5 years. It is still a crime punishable by 5 years in jail.

If I have Internet service and they want my records on somebody, they don't tell me or a judge. We have no idea. There is no probable cause. This person might be relevant, which could mean anything, however tangential. If I don't reveal those records, I go to jail. If I tell my wife they are asking for my records, I could go to jail.

This secrecy on millions of records, this trolling through millions of records is un-American. It is unconstitutional. They have modified the Constitution through statutory law. We have given up our rights. It should be two-thirds of this body voting to change the Constitution and three-fourths of the States. We did it by 50 percent with one bill. The bill was hot when it came here. There was one copy of it. No one read it.

I came from the tea party, and I said: We must read the bills. I propose that we wait 1 day for every 20 pages so we are ensured they are reading the bills. The PATRIOT Act was hundreds of pages long and nobody read it. Not one person read it because it wasn't even hardly printed. There were penciled edits in the margin, and it was passed because we were afraid.

But we can't be so afraid that we give up our liberties. I think it is more important than that. I think it is a sad day today in America that we are afraid to debate this. The great constitutional questions such as this, or great constitutional questions such as whether we can go to war with just the word of the President, these great constitutional questions are not being debated because we are so fearful of debate.

I urge the Senate to reconsider. I urge the Senate to consider debating the PATRIOT Act, to consider amendments, and to consider the Constitution.

Thank you. I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise in response to a scurrilous accusation. I have been accused of wanting to allow terrorists who attack America to have weapons. To be attacked of such a belief when I am here to discuss and debate the constitutionality of the PATRIOT Act is offensive. I find it personally insulting, and I think it demeans the body--it demeans the Senate body and the people that we cannot have an intelligent debate over the constitutionality of this bill.

I am somehow to be told that because I believe a judge should sign a warrant, that I am in favor of terrorists having weapons? The absurdity of it. The insult of it. If one argues that judges should sign warrants before they go into the house of an alleged murderer, are you in favor of murder? Can we not have a debate on a higher plane--a debate over whether there should be some constitutional protections, some constitutional procedure--than to come to the floor and accuse me of being in favor of giving weapons to terrorists?

The question is, Can our Constitution withstand, is our Constitution strong enough that we could actually capture terrorists and protect our liberties at the same time? Should we have some rules that say, before they come into your house, before they go into your banking records, that a judge should be asked for permission; that there should be judicial review? Do we want a lawless land? Do we want a land that is so much without restraint, a government without restraint, that at any point in time they can come into your house? We were very worried about that very thing. That is why our country was founded on such principles as the fourth amendment, to protect us from an overzealous government.

But to transfer an argument, where good people might disagree, into an accusation that I would let terrorists have weapons? No, I believe we would stop terrorism but do it in a constitutional fashion, where one would have a warrant issued by a judge.

Some people say, we don't have enough time to do that. At 3 in the morning, judges are routinely called when someone is accused of rape or accused of murder. When there is an alleged crime, we get warrants, and it works. It has worked for 225 years, until we decided to throw out the Constitution. We threw out the Constitution with the PATRIOT Act because we changed the Constitution--not by two-thirds in this body voting for it and not by three-fourths of the States but by a scared 51 percent who threw out their liberties. They said: Make me safe. Make me safe. I am afraid. Make me safe. But they gave up their liberties.

I think that was a mistake, and I think we should have an intelligent and rational discussion. I don't think it furthers the debate to accuse someone who has constitutional concerns about the way we are doing things of being in favor of putting weapons into the hands of terrorists. I object strongly to this.

The leader has said they will compromise. He said 1 week of debate in February and open amendments; that they would be open to amendments-- even amendments they disagreed with. We will do whatever people feel is appropriate on this bill. That doesn't mean just amendments that are not emotional or just amendments that have nothing to do with guns.

They are petrified to vote on issues over guns because they know a lot of people in America favor the second amendment; that they own guns and want to protect that right to own guns and the right to have those records not sifted through by the government. We don't want to have a government that eventually will allow for direction of the police toward those who own guns. We don't want our records to be public. We don't want our records to be sifted through by a government without judicial review. But they do not want to vote on this because they know the American people agree with us. If we polled this question, we would find 80 to 90 percent of Americans don't want their banking records, don't want their gun records to be sifted through by a government without a judge ever giving any approval.

This is a constitutional question, and I would ask the leader to stand by his agreement to an open amendment process.

At this time, I ask unanimous consent that my amendments, Nos. 363, 365, and 368, be in order, with 1 hour of debate on each, followed by a rollcall vote. I ask unanimous consent that this occur at this time.

Mr. President, in accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend rule XXII, including germaneness requirements, for the purpose of proposing and considering amendment No. 363 on the House message to S. 990.

Mr. President, in accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend rule XXII, including germaneness requirements, for the purpose of proposing and considering amendment No. 364 on the House message to S. 990.

Mr. President, in accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend rule XXII, including germaneness requirements, for the purpose of proposing and considering amendment No. 365 on the House message to S. 990.

Mr President, in accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend rule XXII, including germaneness requirements, for the purpose of proposing and considering amendment No. 366 on the House message to S. 990.

Mr. President, in accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend rule XXII, including germaneness requirements, for the purpose of proposing and considering amendment No. 367 on the House message to S. 990.

Mr. President, in accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend rule XXII, including germaneness requirements, for the purpose of proposing and considering amendment No. 368 on the House message to S. 990.

Mr. President, in accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend rule XXII, including germaneness requirements, for the purpose of proposing and considering amendment No. 369 on the House message to S. 990.

Mr. President, in accordancewith rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend rule XXII, including germaneness requirements, for the purpose of proposing and considering amendment No. 370 on the House message to S. 990.

Mr. President, in accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend rule XXII, including germaneness requirements, for the purpose of proposing and considering amendment No. 371 on the House message to S. 990.

Mr. President, in accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend rule XXII, including germaneness requirements, for the purpose of proposing and considering amendment No. 372 on the House message to S. 990.

Mr. President, in accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend rule XXII, including germaneness and timeliness requirements, for the purpose of proposing and considering amendment No. 373 on the House message to S. 990.

Mr. President, in accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend rule XXII, including germaneness and timeliness requirements, for the purpose of proposing and considering amendment No. 374 on the House message to S. 990.

Mr. President, in accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Mr. President, in accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend rule XXII, including germaneness and timeliness requirements, for the purpose of proposing and considering amendment No. 375 on the House message to S. 990.

Mr. President, in accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend rule XXII, including germaneness and timeliness requirements, for the purpose of proposing and considering amendment No. 376 on the House message to S. 990.

Mr. President, in accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend rule XXII, including germaneness and timeliness requirements, for the purpose of proposing and considering amendment No. 377 on the House message to S. 990.

Mr. President, in accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend rule XXII, including germaneness and timeliness requirements, for the purpose of proposing and considering amendment No. 378 on the House message to S. 990.

Mr. President, in accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend rule XXII, including germaneness and timeliness requirements, for the purpose of proposing and considering amendment No. 379 on the House message to S. 990.

Mr. President, in accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend rule XXII, including germaneness and timeliness requirements, for the purpose of proposing and considering amendment No. 380 on the House message to S. 990.

Mr. President, in accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend rule XXII, including germaneness and timeliness requirements, for the purpose of proposing and considering amendment No. 381 on the House message to S. 990.

Mr. President, in accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move

to suspend rule XXII, including germaneness and timeliness requirements, for the purpose of proposing and considering amendment No. 382 on the House message to S. 990.

Mr. President, in accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend Rule XIV, paragraphs 3 and 4 for the purpose of moving to proceed to S.J. Res. 15, as follows:

S.J. Res. 15

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the

United States of America in Congress assembled, That--

(1) a state of war between the United States and the

Government of Libya is hereby formally declared; and

(2) the President is hereby authorized and directed--

(A) to employ the entire naval and military forces of the

United States and the resources of the United States

Government to carry on war against the Government of Libya;

and

(B) to issue to private armed vessels of the United States

commissions or letters of marque and general reprisal, in

such form as the President shall think proper, and under the

seal of the United States, against the vessels, goods, and

effects of the Government of Libya.

Mr. President, in accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend Rule XIV, paragraphs 3 and 4 for the purpose of moving to proceed to S.J. Res. 16, as follows:

S.J. Res. 16

Whereas Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution of the

United States reserves for Congress the right to declare war;

Whereas the War Powers Resolution (50 U.S.C. 1541 et seq.)

states that it is intended to ``fulfill the intent of the

framers of the Constitution of the United States'' in

requiring the President to seek the consent of Congress

before the introduction of the United States Armed Forces

into hostile action;

Whereas the President must seek authorization from Congress

prior to engaging the United States Armed Forces in an armed

conflict absent an imminent threat to national security;

Whereas President Barack Obama, without seeking a formal

authorization from Congress, ordered the execution of a

sustained military engagement through the enforcement of a

no-fly zone in Libya on March 19, 2011;

Whereas Congress did not consider or pass a formal

authorization for the President to initiate military

operations in Libya;

Whereas the War Powers Resolution establishes that the

President must notify Congress of the introduction of the

United States Armed Forces within 48 hours after commencing

such action;

Whereas President Obama acknowledged his obligation to

submit a notification of his actions in Libya under the War

Powers Resolution through a letter delivered on March 21,

2011, to Speaker of the House John Boehner and President Pro

Tempore of the Senate Daniel Inouye;

Whereas section 8(a) the War Powers Resolution (50 U.S.C.

1547(a)) establishes that the President may not construe

authorization from any other act or treaty unless such act or

treaty is ``implemented by legislation specifically

authorizing the introduction of the United States Armed

Forces into hostilities'';

Whereas President Obama contends that hostile engagement by

the military forces of the United States against the

Government of Libya was part of a multilateral response

authorized by United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973

(2011) and in consultation with the Arab League;

Whereas section 2(c) of the War Powers Resolution (50

U.S.C. 1541(c)) provides that no attempt by the President to

introduce the United States Armed Forces into hostile action

may be made under the War Powers Resolution unless there is

``(1) a declaration of war, (2) a specific authorization, or

(3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United

States, its territories or possessions, or its armed

forces'';

Whereas the Government of Libya, immediately prior to the

introduction of the United States Armed Forces into the

conflict on March 19, 2011, had not attacked the United

States nor declared any intent to do so;

Whereas President Obama had stated the purpose of enforcing

a no-fly zone over Libya was to ``take all necessary measures

to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under

threat of attack in Libya'' and not in response to any direct

or immediate threat to the United States;

Whereas section 5(b) of the War Powers Resolution (50

U.S.C. 1544(b)) further establishes that, in absence of

authorization from Congress, the President may not engage the

United States Armed Forces in an armed conflict for a period

longer than ``sixty calendar days'';

Whereas members of the United States Armed Forces have

remained engaged in operations in Libya since March 19, 2011;

Whereas, on May 20, 2011, the limit of sixty calendar days

placed on the President's ability to continue engagement of

the military forces of the United States against the

Government of Libya will have been exhausted under the terms

of the War Powers Resolution;

Whereas Section 5(b) of the War Powers Resolution (50

U.S.C. 1544(b)) requires that ``within sixty calendar days .

. . the President shall terminate any use of United States

Armed Forces . . . unless the Congress (1) has declared war

or has enacted a specific authorization for such use of the

United States Armed Forces, (2) has extended by law such

sixty-day period, or (3) is physically unable to meet as a

result of an armed attack upon the United States'';

Whereas President Obama reiterated on May 20, 2011, that

the military forces of the United States remain engaged in

hostilities, including ``suppression and destruction of air

defenses'' and ``precision strikes by unmanned aerial

vehicles'';

Whereas Congress has not considered or passed a formal

authorization for the President to continue military

operations in Libya; and

Whereas President Obama has not indicated any intent to

cease operations in Libya after the sixty-day limit

established by the War Powers Resolution: Now, therefore, be

it:

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the

United States of America in Congress assembled, That

Congress--

(1) declares that, as it pertains to the continuing armed

engagement of the United States Armed Forces against the

Government of Libya, the President has exceeded the statutory

time limits placed on him by the War Powers Resolution and is

therefore in violation of the law; and

(2) calls on the President to--

(A) seek a formal authorization from Congress to continue

the mission in Libya; or

(B) cease armed engagement against the Government of Libya

until such time as further action is authorized by Congress.

Mr. President, in accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend Rule XIV, paragraphs 3 and 4 for the purpose of moving to proceed to S. 1070, as follows:

Mr. President, in accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend Rule XIV, paragraphs 3 and 4 for the purpose of moving to proceed to S. 1071, as follows:

Mr. President, in accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend Rule XIV, paragraphs 3 and 4 for the purpose of moving to proceed to S. 1072, as follows:

Mr. President, in accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend Rule XIV, paragraphs 3 and 4 for the purpose of moving to proceed to S. 1073, as follows:

Mr. President, in accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in

writing that it is my intention to move to suspend Rule XIV, paragraphs 3 and 4 for the purpose of moving to proceed to S. 1074, as follows:

Mr. President, in accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend Rule XIV, paragraphs 3 and 4 for the purpose of moving to proceed to S. 1075, as follows:

Mr. President, in accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend Rule XIV, paragraphs 3 and 4 for the purpose of moving to proceed to S. 1076, as follows:

Mr. President, in accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend Rule XIV, paragraphs 3 and 4 for the purpose of moving to proceed to S. 1077, as follows:

Mr. President, I was a small businessman before I was elected to the Senate. I know well the struggles small businesses face because of government regulations and taxes. I also know that small businesses are a key driver of economic growth and employment. That is why I join the Senate and the President in recognizing the contributions of small businesses all over the country during National Small Business Week.

Unfortunately, this resolution goes a step beyond recognizing the hard- working entrepreneurs who are our small businessmen and businesswomen. The resolution also praises big government and using taxpayer dollars to subsidize small businesses. I do not believe small businesses need government assistance to exist. I do not believe we need an entire agency of the Federal Government to encourage entrepreneurs. Quite the opposite--I believe that with less government, businesses of all sizes will be created, existing businesses will grow, and the American spirit will thrive. That is why I voted against this resolution.

Mr. President, there has been a lot of discussion of the PATRIOT Act, and we are told basically that we wouldn't be able to capture these terrorists if we didn't give up some of our liberties, if we didn't give up some of the fourth amendment and allow it to be easier for the police to come into our homes. We were so frightened after 9/11 that we readily gave up these freedoms.

We said: Well, the fourth amendment is not that important. We will just let the government look at all of our records, and we will make it easier for the government to look at our records.

The question we have to ask, though, is whether we would still be able to catch terrorists by using the fourth amendment as it was intended and having the protections of the fourth amendment. What we have to ask ourselves is, think about the worst person in our communities. Think about someone accused of murder or rape or a pedophile. We think of these people, and do we know what happens if someone is accused of that? Even if it is 3 o'clock in the morning and they want to get their records or they want to go into their houses, they call a judge. This is something very important. They get the warrants almost all the time. But it is one step of protection. What we have is the protection where we don't have police officers writing warrants to come into our houses. They have to have it reviewed by a judge.

What we have done through the PATRIOT Act is taken away some of the protections of the fourth amendment. The fourth amendment says we need to name the person and the place to be searched. We have taken away those protections. The fourth amendment says we need to have probable cause. We have taken that away and made it to, if it is relevant, or we think they might be related to it.

Originally, the FISA Court lowered the standards somewhat on the fourth amendment, but it recognized that it was lowering the standard and was careful. We had secret courts set up, and the FISA Court was the court that dealt with things that had to do with national security or terrorism or intelligence. The information was kept secret so we didn't let everybody in the world know the name, but the name had to be divulged to the judges. Well, those who argue that we have to have the PATRIOT Act, or we have to do this or we will not be able to stop terrorism, they need to explain why the FISA Court did tens of thousands of search warrants and never turned any down. In fact, the history before the PATRIOT Act was no search warrant had ever been turned down.

So do we want to give up our liberties in exchange for more security? Franklin said those who give up their liberty in exchange for security may end up with neither.

Right now, if someone has a Visa bill that is over $5,000 and chooses to pay for it over the phone, which is a wire transfer, the government is probably looking at their Visa bill. They don't have to show probable cause, and they don't have to have a judge's warrant. This does apply to U.S. citizens. Often they will tell us: Oh, it is only foreign terrorists we are looking at. They want us to feel good about allowing them to spy. But this spying is going on by the tens of thousands and even by the millions.

With regard to these suspicious activity reports, we have done over 4 million of them in the last 10 years. We are now doing over 1 million a year. These suspicious activity reports, all the trigger is--it doesn't have to have anything to do with terrorism. The trigger is just that someone has over $5,000 that they have transferred by bank account.

We say, well, the courts have decided our bank records aren't private. Well, the hell they aren't. They should be private. If someone looks at my Visa records, they can tell whether I go to the doctor and what kind of doctor I go to. They can conceivably tell what kind of medication I am on. They can tell what kind of magazines I read. They can tell what kind of books I order from Amazon. Do we want a government that looks at our Visa bill? Do we want a government that looks at all of our records and is finding out what our reading habits are?

One of the provisions applies to library records. Do we really want the government to go and find out what we are reading at the library?

We now have a President who is wanting to know where a person has contributed before they do work for the government. Do we really want that kind of all-encompassing government that is looking at every record from top to bottom and invading our privacy?

There is another aspect of these so-called national security letters. These are basically warrants that are written by FBI agents. No judge reviews them. This is specifically what James Otis was worried about when he talked about general warrants that weren't specifying the person or the place and that were written by police officers. This is a problem because this is--we depend on the checks and balances in our society. We never want to give all of the authority to either one group of Congress or to the President or to police or judges. We have checks and balances to try to prevent abuse.

Some have said, well, if one has nothing to hide, why do you care? The thing is, it will not always be angels who are in charge of government. We have rules because we want to prevent the day that may occur when we get somebody who takes over our government through elected office or otherwise who is intent on using the tools of government to pry into our affairs, to snoop on what we are doing, to punish us for our political or religious beliefs. That is what we don't ever want: to let the law become so expansive.

We have to realize we can still get terrorists. We get rapists and murderers every day by calling a judge.

That is what I am asking for. I am asking that we go through and obey the fourth amendment. Many conservatives have argued that, well, they love the second amendment. Some liberals say, well, they love and will protect the first amendment. Do you know what. If we do not protect the entire bill of rights, we are not going to have any of it. If we want to protect our right to own a gun, we need to protect our gun records from the government looking at our gun records and finding out whether we have been buying a gun at a gun show.

We need to protect our privacy. If we want to protect the first amendment, we have to have the fourth amendment. In fact, we specifically had to go back there. The original PATRIOT Act said we could not even consult with our attorneys. We could not even tell our attorneys. We were gagged from telling our attorneys.

Even now, though, one may say: I do not know if they have investigated me. Do you know why? Because they tell our phone company, if they are looking at our phone records right now or our Visa records, it is against the law for Visa or the phone company to tell us that. It is hundreds of thousands of dollars of fines and jail time. It is 5 years in jail if our phone company tells us they have been spying on us.

Some of this does not even require a letter from government. Some of it is done by the banks. The suspicious activity reports, we have simply told the bank: Here, anybody who deals in cash, anybody who has over a $5,000 wire transfer or who deals in large amounts of money--it is incumbent upon the bank to spy on their customers now.

This is a real problem, and I think we need to have some argument and debate in our country over these things. Some want to have these things permanently. They want to permanently give up their fourth amendment protections, and I disagree strongly. Not only would I let these expire, but I think we should sunset the entire PATRIOT Act and protect our liberties as intended by our Founding Fathers.

James Otis was an attorney in Boston, and he wrote about these things they called, in those days, writs of assistance. These were general warrants. The king would write them--or actually they were written by soldiers here. They did not name the person to be searched or the place, and they were used as a way to have the king have his way with the people and to bully the people.

The idea of general warrants is what sorely offended our Founding Fathers. That is why we got the fourth amendment. The fourth amendment was a product of a decade or more of James Otis arguing cases against the British Government.

But the question we have to ask ourselves when thinking about these issues is, is it so simple that we can just say: Well, I am either against terrorism or I am going to let terrorists run wild and take over the country. One can be opposed to terrorists. We can go after terrorists. We can go after murderers and rapists and people who commit crimes. But we can do it with a process that protects the innocent.

I think so far they say we have looked at 28 million electronic records. We have looked at 1,600,000 text messages. We have 800,000 hours of audio. We have so much audio they do not even listen to it all. Twenty-five percent of what they have recorded of our phone conversations is not listened to because they do not even have time to listen to it.

My point would be that we are eavesdropping on so many people it could be we are missing out and not targeting. Just like at airports-- every one of us is being searched in the airport. We are not terrorists, and we are no threat to our country. Why are we not looking for people who would attack us and spending time on those people? Why do we not go to a judge and say: This person we suspect of dealing with this terrorist group. Will you give us a warrant?

Why don't we have those steps? Instead, we are mining and going through millions of records. I think we are overwhelmed with the records that we may well be doing less of a good job with terrorism because we are looking at everyone's records.

The bottom line is, I do not want to live in a country where we give up our freedoms, our privacy. I do not want to live in a country that loses its constitutional protections of us as individuals. We do have a right to privacy. We have a right not to have the government reading our Visa bills every month. We do have rights, and we should protect them. We should not be so fearful that we say: Well, I am a good person. I don't care, just look at my records. If we do, we are setting ourselves up for a day when there will be a tyranny, when there will be a despot who comes into power in the United States and who uses those rules for which we said: Oh, well, I don't have anything to hide.

What happens when someone takes over who believes one's religion is to be combatted, who believes one's political beliefs and literature should be combated? What happens when that day comes?

We cannot give up our liberty. If we do, if we give up our liberty and we trade it for security, we will have neither.

So I rise in opposition to the cloture motion. I will be offering amendments to the PATRIOT Act this week, and we will be having a real debate about how we can stop terrorism but also preserve freedom at the same time.

I thank the Chair.

Mr. President, sports teams often have a motto. They want to describe how they are going to win the event. The Senate Democrats have a motto and it goes something like this, ``I am from the government and I am here to help.''

Beware when your government comes to help. They have figured out there is a problem and the problem is gas prices are rising and people are being hurt by the rising prices. Actually, if we measure inflation the way we did back in the 1970s, we have inflation of 10 percent.

Senator Coburn is exactly right. It has to do with the fact that we are losing the value of our dollar. Our dollar is going down in value because we spend money we don't have and we are running up these enormous deficits. But it is a problem nonetheless.

But those who believe government is always the answer are rushing to rescue us. They are rushing to rescue us from high prices at the gas pump, but they haven't even diagnosed the problem, so they are going to come up with the wrong solution. Their solution is to raise taxes on oil companies. Do my colleagues know what taxes are? Taxes are simply a cost. If you run a business and I raise your costs, you will raise your prices. So let's see. Prices are too high, so we are going to raise the cost, which will raise the prices further. It makes absolutely no sense.

It is because their motto is wrong. Their motto is, ``I am here from the government and I am going to help you.'' Their motto is, ``It is the government that is going to solve your problems.'' But they are going to solve your problems by compounding your problems.

The price of gasoline is a problem. If we include the price of gasoline and the

price of food in the CPI, it would be 10 percent or higher. People are struggling to pay for gas. What are the main things people who are just getting by pay for? Their gas, their food, their rent. So how are we going to make it better? We are going to make it worse before we make it better. We are going to raise costs to the oil companies by raising their taxes, which means we will pay more at the pump.

It is economic illiteracy and it is what is wrong up here in Washington. We still have too many people who do not understand the basic economic realities. If you raise costs on a business, if you raise taxes on a business, you will raise prices at the pump.

The interesting thing is, there are some answers. They say: Well, let's go after those greedy oil companies because they are making a profit. Out of every $1 you spend at the pump, about 7 cents is profit to the oil companies. Well, do you know what. If you eliminate profit, you will not have oil companies. Everybody works for a profit. We all work harder because we want to maximize our profit.

Who owns the oil companies? Is it a bunch of greedy rich people running their fingers through piles of gold? Are they Midas in some room full of gold? You own the oil companies. I own the oil companies. If you have a 401(k), if you have an IRA, if you have a mutual fund, you own the oil companies. OK. Corporations are owned by people.

Do some people make a lot of money in the corporations? Yes, but if we limit that or try to obscure that or try to get rid of profit, you will get rid of companies. Then where will they go? They will go overseas. Oil companies are international. If you make it hard for them to do business here, they will flee our country. And they already do. We have high corporate taxes in our country, so they keep their profits overseas.

Lower corporate taxes--do not raise taxes--lower taxes and people will bring their profits home to the United States.

This is their profit, as shown on this chart: The oil companies make about 7 cents on the dollar. How much does the Federal Government take? The Federal Government takes 18 cents of every $1.

Do you want to have lower gas prices this summer? Do you want to help the people who are struggling? Let's have a gas tax holiday. It is only a short-term solution, but let's get rid of the 18 cents for the next 4 months through the summer season. It will cost the Treasury. There will be less money coming into the Treasury: $10 billion to $12 billion over 4 months. Let's take it from somewhere else. We are spending $30 billion a year in foreign aid. This is money we give away to other countries so they can build schools, they can build bridges, so they can rebuild their infrastructure. We give this away to foreign countries. A lot of times it winds up in the hands of foreign leaders who simply steal it. Mubarak was said to have gotten $60 billion over 30 years and accumulated at least $5 billion to $10 billion we can count that he stole. Many of these dictators throughout the African nations, as well as throughout the rest of the world, have simply stolen our foreign aid money and used it for their own personal aggrandizement.

Let's eliminate the gas tax. Let's take the money from foreign aid and let's give it back to the American people who have worked hard to earn it. You cannot do this forever, but you can do it for 4 months, and pay for it by getting rid of foreign aid. That would help people. That would lower the price of gasoline, and that would be a stimulus to the economy.

What I am saying is, let's have a gas tax holiday. Let's eliminate Federal taxes for the next 4 months on gas, and let's take the money that would be lost, put it into the highway fund, but let's take it from money we are giving away to other countries. That would be a short-term answer.

There is also a long-term answer. Senator Coburn was right that much of the price of gasoline rising is from inflation. Basically we are destroying the value of the dollar. But there is another reason gas prices rise: because demand for oil and gas is outstripping the supply.

Why don't we have more supply? Because the current administration is basically an enemy to production, an enemy to drilling, an enemy to all things related to energy. We now are going back and looking at permits to mine coal that have been approved for 10 years. We are taking away drilling permits to drill for oil in Utah, in Alaska, off our coast. If we want gasoline prices to be less, if we want to send less money to Middle Eastern countries that hate us that we have to buy oil from, let's make more here. Let's drill for oil. Let's produce more here. Let's drill in Alaska. Let's open up new places to drill.

Can we do it responsibly? Yes. Nobody wants to damage the environment. Do it responsibly, but let's produce energy here. We have, as Senator Coburn says, 160 million barrels of oil waiting to be extracted. Let's go for it. But we have to have a government that is friendly to energy. We have a government now, an administration that is unfriendly to energy and at every aspect of producing energy places roadblocks. They think for some reason we can get electricity to supply our country from some windmills that are made in China. What we need is, we need oil and gas production in our country. We need nuclear energy in our country. We need coal in our country. We have the ability, we have the resources, but we need to get government out of the way. Instead, what we are doing is placing new obstacles.

There will be a long-term solution that Senator McConnell and our party will introduce. I will support that also. It will encourage domestic production of oil and gas, domestic production of energy. That is what we need. But you are not going to get it until we have new faces here in Washington because the current crop of faces is opposing production at every turn.

I wish to conclude by saying, if you want to help people, even for a short period of time, there is a short-term solution. Let's get rid of the gas tax for 4 months. Let's pay for it by not sending the money overseas to have other countries either steal it or build their own infrastructure. Let's keep those U.S. tax dollars here at home. Better yet, let's keep them in the pockets of the consumers by having a gas tax holiday.

Thank you very much. I yield back the remainder of my time.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, it is amazing to me to be lectured to and hear about how awful the tea party is from folks who have never been to a tea party to hear what the tea party represents. Come on down. Bring your Huey Long rhetoric that there will be a chicken in every pot and a windmill in every backyard. Bring it down to the tea party and let's have a discussion. Bring it out to the public.

We hear from those who want to lecture the tea party about cutting spending. Who among these folks has voted against an appropriations bill? We haven't even seen one this year. We didn't see a budget. We are spending $2 trillion that we don't have, and they are here blaming it on the tea party.

Who is in charge here? It is not the tea party. Blame it on us. Give us an appropriations bill. Give us a budget. Do something constructive to fix the fiscal problems we have up here.

They say compromise is the ideal. They tell the tea party: You need to compromise. But do you know what the compromise is? They want to raise taxes. The debt commission wants to raise taxes. The President wants to raise taxes. That is what they are talking about.

Yesterday, the President said he is going to cut $4 trillion. Well, try to read what is going on here. He said he was going to spend $46 trillion a month ago in his budget. Before we even discuss his budget, he is going to cut $4 trillion off the $46 trillion he is going to spend. These are no cuts. We will spend more this year than we spent last year. Forget about all the numbers, all the baselines, and forget about 6, 60, 30, 78, or 0, which is what the CBO scored this yesterday--zero in cuts. Forget about it and ask your Representatives: Are we going to spend more this year than last? If we are, that is not a cut. Ask your Representatives, ask your Senators: Will the deficit be more this year than last year?

The deficit will be bigger this year. We threaten to shut down government over nothing because we are not cutting spending in any serious way. They want to blame it on the tea party because in their secret caucus meetings they have done a poll that says the tea party could be the villain. Call them ``extreme,'' call them all ``tea partiers,'' say the tea party has ``taken over'' the Republican Party.

Do you know what the tea party believes in? Good government. We believe in balancing the budget, in reducing spending. We have plans to fix Social Security. We introduced a plan yesterday. If the other side is serious about fixing entitlements, we have a plan. Come to us and work with us, but don't just come down here and call us names.

Before you send any more money to Washington, ask your representatives whether they are spending your money wisely. Mr. President, $100 billion in the budget last year is unaccounted for. We don't know where it was spent or we think it was improperly spent--$100 billion. In our senatorial offices we get several million dollars. Some of us want to be frugal with that and send some back to the Treasury. We plan on sending several hundred thousand dollars back. We want to know where the money goes. We are still not certain. We have been asking for months.

Some people say that money is kept in some fund for 3 years and may go back. Other people told us that the leadership spends that money. We don't have a definitive answer for even trying to save a couple hundred thousand dollars of your money that we have control of.

The Pentagon spends a lot of money. Are they spending the money wisely? You don't know because we cannot audit them. Why? Because the Pentagon tells us that they are too big to audit. You heard about the companies saying they are too big to fail. The government now tells you they are too big to be audited. We got a partial audit of the Federal Reserve, and we got some information from that.

We are now fighting the war against Qadhafi. Last month, we were giving him money. We gave him some foreign aid, and we helped to bail out his national bank. The national banks in those countries are the leaders' piggy bank. Half of it is probably spirited off to secret accounts in Switzerland. The U.S. taxpayer bailed out Qadhafi's bank, and now we are bombing it.

The budget bill that we are talking about has now been scored by the CBO and will cut almost nothing--maybe a couple hundred million dollars. It will increase defense spending by $8 billion and cut spending by $8 billion. The net is about zero. Our deficit this year will be bigger than last year. Our overall spending will be bigger this year than last year.

We are not yet serious in Washington. We have not yet recognized the severity, the enormity, and the significance of how big this deficit is. This deficit is going to have serious repercussions. The Chinese have bought over $1 trillion of our debt, and the Japanese, nearly a trillion.

The Japanese have suffered an enormous national disaster. The question is, Will they continue to buy our debt or can they?

The other question is, How long can a government continue to exist that spends more than it brings in? On the other side, they want to blame the tea party or the Republicans or the rich people. Do you know what. Both parties are responsible--Republicans, Democrats, Senators, Congressmen, the President--everybody up here is responsible. It is not one party or the other.

When Republicans were in charge, they ran up the deficit. Now the Democrats are in charge, and the main difference is that they are doing it faster. The Republicans weren't doing a good job either during our time in power.

We have to understand that the people can do things; not everything has to be done up here. The States can do things. We have to believe once again in the American dream. Believing in the American dream is not standing on the floor and castigating rich people. What is great about our country is that any among us--any of our kids--can become rich people if they work hard, go to school, and achieve. We live in a mobile society, and that is what the American dream is about. We got away from Europe because all the land was owned and stifled by the nobility. We came here where there was plenty of land and opportunity, and the American dream is believing in that.

The interesting thing is, when they try to soak the rich--this old Huey Long stuff--it is actually failing with the American people because many of us believe that our kids could gain great wealth or great success. We still believe in the American dream. If they want to castigate that and say forget about it and say what we need is just more government, they need to explain to people why they don't believe in

capitalism, in the American dream, and why they don't believe in the greatness of America.

I still believe in America. I want to get government out of the way. I think we cannot have an America that succeeds until we are able to do something about our debt crisis. I fear that no one up here--or very few here--on either side recognizes the severity and imminence of this problem. My hope is that before a crisis occurs in our country we will begin to seriously discuss balancing our budget and have plans to do so and seriously cut spending.

Mr. President, I voted against this short-term continuing resolution for the same reason I voted against the last one and the one before that--because it does not set us on a

path to fixing the spending and debt problems our country is facing. As I have said before, there is not much of a difference between a $1.5 trillion deficit and a $1.6 trillion deficit--both will lead us to a debt crisis from which we may not recover.

Mr. President, in accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend Rule XIV, paragraphs 3 and 4 for the purpose of moving to proceed to S. 768, a bill to provide for continuing operations of Government in a fiscally responsible manner.

Mr. President, I very much thank the majority leader for allowing this important debate to occur.

During his campaign, Candidate Barrack Obama said no President should unilaterally initiate military conflict without Congressional authority. I agree with that statement. It is a very important constitutional principle and something that I think deserves debate.

I think the most important thing we do as representatives is voting on whether to go to war. If Congress does not vote to go to war or does not vote on the notion of going to war, we would have an unlimited Presidency, and this is a very dangerous notion.

I would take this position no matter what the party affiliation were of the President because I believe very strongly in the constitutional checks and balances. We will vote today on the President's own words verbatim. During the election, the President said: ``The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the Nation.''

Clearly, the circumstances in Libya do not rise to this, and I think this vote is incredibly important. Madison wrote that:

The Constitution supposes what history demonstrates. That

the executive is the branch most interested in war and most

prone to it. Therefore, the Constitution has with studied

care given that power to the legislature.

``Don't tread on me'' was a motto and a rallying cry for our Founding Fathers. The motto of Congress appears to be: ``Tread on me, please tread on me.'' The Congress has become not just a rubber stamp for an unlimited Presidency, but, worse, Congress has become a doormat to be stepped upon, to be ignored, and basically to be treated as irrelevant.

Some would say: We had no time. We had to go to war. There was no time for debate. When we were attacked in World War II on December 7, Pearl Harbor, within 24 hours this body came together and voted to declare war on Japan. There is no excuse for the Senate not to vote on going to war before we go to war.

The President had time to go to the United Nations, have a discussion, and a vote. The President had time to go to the Arab League, have a discussion, and a vote. The President had the time to go to NATO. But the President had no time to come to the people's house, to the Congress, and ask, as the Constitution dictates, for the approval of the American people and for the approval of Congress.

Why is this important? It is important because when our Nation was founded, we were founded as a constitutional Republic. We placed limitations not only on the President but on the Congress. We are supposed to obey the Constitution. These are important principles and we have gone beyond that. We have gotten to the point where my question is, Are we even obeying the Constitution in this body?

This is a sad day. This is a sad day for America. The thing is, we need to have checks and balances. Do we want an unlimited Presidency, a Presidency that could take us to war anywhere, anytime, without the approval of Congress?

Some have said: We are going to have a vote sometime, sometime in the next couple weeks. When we get around to it, we may have a debate about Libya. Had the President shown true leadership, the President would have, when he called the United Nations, when he called the Arab League, when he called NATO, the President would have called the leadership of the Senate and the leadership of the House, and we would have been here within 24 hours, having what should be the most momentous debate this body ever has on sending our young brave men and women to war.

We are currently engaged in two wars, and we are now going to be engaged in a third war. The interesting point is, when we went into Iraq and Afghanistan, we had votes in this body. President Bush came to Congress and there were votes.

The War Powers Act--some on the other side say: This is no big deal. The President can do whatever he wants as long as he notifies Congress within a certain period of time.

This is not a correct interpretation of the War Powers Act. The War Powers Act does say he needs to notify Congress. But the War Powers Act also says the President must meet three hurdles before taking our troops into harm's way.

No. 1, there should be a declaration of war or there should be an authorization of force from this body or there should be imminent danger to the Nation. None of those were adhered to. The law was not adhered to.

Some will say: The War Powers Act, no President recognizes it. Well, The War Powers Act is the law of the land, and the President needs to respect not only the statutory law of the land but the Constitution. I do not think these are trivial questions. But I am bemused, I am confused, I do not understand why your representatives are not down here debating such a momentous event as going to war.

I can think of no vote and no debate more important than sending our young men and women to war. It should be done reluctantly. We should go to war only when threatened as a nation. When engaged in two wars, we should debate the prudence of being involved in a third war. These are not trivial questions. I am amazed this body does not take the time to debate whether we should be in Libya.

Some have said: We will debate it next week. The problem is, the debate should occur before we go to war. At this point, we will have a vote. We will have a vote on the President's own words.

I will yield for a minute or two for a question, if that is OK. I yield to the Senator from Utah.

Has morning business concluded?

I have a motion to present to the desk.

Can we report the bill, please?

Madam President, I have a motion at the desk.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Madam President, we are engaged in a third war at a time when our country is struggling under an enormous debt, at a time when we are engaged in two wars. Historically, our country has fought war by asking for congressional authority. This was true in Iraq. This was true in Afghanistan. The President came to Congress, and there was a vote on use of force prior to him engaging in force.

Some say: Well, this is no big deal; the President should be able to fight war whenever he wants to fight war. I beg to differ, and our Founding Fathers begged to differ. Madison said that the Constitution supposes what history demonstrates, that the executive is the branch most prone to war and most interested in it. Therefore, the Constitution has, with studied care, invested the power to declare war in the Congress.

I think this is an incredibly important debate. When we talk about sending our young men and women into harm's way, into another war, the fact that we would have a President send us to war without any debate-- your people's representatives have had absolutely no debate, and we are now involved in a third war.

The language of my resolution is not unfamiliar to many. The language of this resolution is the President's words.

In 2007, Barack Obama said:

The President does not have power under the Constitution to

unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that

does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the

nation.

This was very clear, what the President said. I agree with what Candidate Barack Obama said. We should not go to war without congressional authority. These are the checks and balances that give you a say, that give the people of America a say through their representatives. This allows us to say when we go to war through our Congress, not through one individual but through 535 individuals whom you elect.

I think the decision to go to war is such an important one that we should not leave it up to one person. Our Founding Fathers agreed with this.

In the 1970s, after Vietnam, we voted on something called the War Powers Act. We did give the President the right to go to war in certain circumstances. These circumstances were, one, if Congress had declared war; two, if Congress had authorized the use of military force, or three, if there was imminent danger to our country. I think all of us recognize that. If we were in imminent danger of attack, we would allow the President some latitude, but we would expect very quickly for him to come to Congress and ask for permission.

In this instance, even the Secretary of Defense has said that Libya is not in our national interest. There is no threat to our national security. Yet we are now involved in a third war. We have already spent $600 million in the first 3 days of this war. There has been no constitutional authority given to the President to be committing troops to this war.

This is such an important constitutional principle that, while I am new here in the Senate, I am appalled that the Senate has abdicated its responsibility, that the Senate has chosen not to act and to allow this power to gravitate to the President. I think that the precedent of allowing a President to continue to act or to initiate war without congressional review, without congressional votes, without the representatives of the people having any say, is a real problem.

There was an article this morning in the Washington Times by GEN Mark Kimmitt. In that, he says that there is a climate of cognitive dissonance surrounding the discussion as the military objectives seem detached from U.S. policy.

The lack of connectivity between the use of force and

campaign objectives, the subordination of the military to a

nondecisive purpose, turns decades of policy on the use of

force on its head.

This is from General Kimmitt this morning:

Vital national interests are not threatened. . . . Nor have

sanctions failed or diplomacy been exhausted. . . . We are

putting the lives of our troops at risk in a nondecisive role

for a mission that does not meet the threshold of a vital or

national interest.

General Kimmitt goes on further:

For a military carrying the burden of three wars on its

back for the foreseeable future, a policy of more frequent

intervention and suboptimal use of force as an instrument of

diplomacy is a mistake.

I come from a State--Kentucky--that has two military bases. I see our young men and women going to war, and I worry about their families and themselves engaged in two wars. Some of these young men and woman have been going to war for 10 years now. And the President now is going to engage us in a third war without any consultation, without any voting in Congress, and without any congressional authority.

I believe this is a very serious breach of our Constitution. It is something we should not let happen lightly. It is something that we should object strenuously to and that we should force a debate on in this body. Many debates historically have happened here, many important debates. And what is happening now is we are abdicating our duty and allowing this to be made unilaterally by one individual. I think it is a mistake, I think it is a travesty, and I think it should end.

There have been some questions about who these people are whom we will be supporting in this new war. I think there is no question that Qadhafi is a tyrant, an autocrat, and someone whom freedom-loving people would despise. However, do we know who the rebels are?

During the 1980s, we supported the Freedom Fighters in Afghanistan. Do you know who turned out to be the leader of the Freedom Fighters, or one of the leaders? Osama bin Laden--now our mortal enemy--was receiving money from the United States and support from the United States for over a decade. In fact, the State Department's stated goal in Afghanistan during the 1980s was ``radical jihad.'' We were in favor of radical jihad because we thought the Islamic radicals hated the Russians worse than us. They did until they got rid of the Russians, and now they hate us as much or more.

I think we have to be very careful in going to war. I told my constituents when I ran for office that the most important vote I would ever take would be on sending their men and women, the boys and girls, the young men and women in my State or anywhere else in the United States, to war. To me, it is amazing--amazing--that we would do this so lightly without any consideration by this august body, send our young men and women to war without any congressional approval.

There have been some reports in the media about possible ties of al- Qaida to the rebels. This morning in the Washington Post, a former leader of Libya's al-Qaida affiliate said he thinks freelance jihadists have joined the rebel forces. A NATO commander said that some of al- Qaida and Hezbollah forces are fighting Qadhafi forces. Former jihadist Noman Ben Otman estimates there are 1,000 jihadists in Libya. These are the rebels.

We have to ask ourselves, when Qadhafi is gone, who will take his place? A 2007 West Point study showed that 19 percent of foreign al- Qaida fighters in Afghanistan hailed from Libya. Libya has been supplying the second leading amount of jihadists to the war in Afghanistan. Interestingly, where do these fighters go? Do the fighters come back to Libya to haunt us? When Qadhafi is gone, will we now have an al-Qaida-supported government in Libya?

But I think most important are not the practical aspects of going to war, it is that we didn't follow the Constitution in going to war, and we should have. The Constitution says very clearly that the power to declare war is the power that was given to Congress and not to the President. James Madison in the Federalist Papers was very explicit that this was a power given to Congress and not to the President.

The President's own words are incredibly important here. The hypocrisy is amazing. In 2007, the President said:

The President does not have the power under the

Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a

situation that does not involve stopping an actual or

imminent threat to the nation.

Yet here we have a President cavalierly taking us to war. He seems to have had a lot of time to talk to people. He talked to the Arab League. They had time to get together and vote on it. He talked to the U.N. They had time to get together and vote on it. But he had utter disregard and contempt for the most important body in the United States that represents the people--the U.S. Congress. Utter contempt. He has gone to NATO. He has gone to our allies. He has gone to the U.N. He has gone to the Arab League. But he has not had one single minute of debate in Congress.

To add insult to injury, he chose to go to war while in Brazil, while Congress was not even in session. This really should not be the way we operate as a constitutional republic.

I am saddened that no one here seems to stand up and say: Why in the world would we let a President take us to war without any debate? Why in the world, when we are involved in two wars, would we get involved with a third war without having a debate in Congress?

This, to me, is a remarkable and really tragic set of events. I hope that the Congress and the Senate in particular will see fit to pass this motion which sends the bill back to committee with specific instructions. The specific instructions are the President's words, and I will be more than interested to see whether his supporters here in the Senate will support the candidate Barack Obama or now the hypocritical version that has become our President.

I think this is an important question beyond any question we will address in this year. Our fiscal problems are really a tragic problem we face now, but this really pales in comparison, to usurp the power of war, to take that power upon himself unilaterally without any debate in Congress.

I urge the passage of this motion to commit to the committee.

Will the Senator yield for a question?

On December 7, 1941, we were attacked and the President declared war. We had a session within 24 hours. On 9/11, we were attacked by people coming from Afghanistan. We met within 3 days and had a use of force authorization. I think there is a problem with sort of saying it is OK to declare that the President can go to war after he has already done it.

In Afghanistan and Iraq, with all the complaints from many people on the different wars in which we are involved, President Bush did come to ask for the authorization of force. We have had 2 to 3 weeks of this issue. They had time to go to the U.N. They had time to go to the Arab League. They had time to go to everyone. I think the Senator from Illinois should be as insulted as I am that they never came to Congress.

The War Powers Act has specific criteria that allows the President to use force: a declared war, when he has use of authorization, or when we are in imminent danger. Which one of those meets the War Powers Act with regard to Libya?

Will the Senator yield for a further question?

I know the word ``hypocritical'' is a strong word. I don't use it lightly. But the words we are using in this resolution that we will get a chance to vote on are the words from the President. The President said: The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the Nation.

How does the Senator from Illinois square that with his actions?

I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment and call up my amendment, No. 199.

I ask unanimous consent the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

This amendment would cost $200 billion in spending. Earlier this morning we voted, nearly unanimously in this body, to cut 5 percent from our legislative budget. Similar to so much in Washington, it sounds good. I voted for it. But 5 percent of our legislative budget will be a few million dollars. We have a deficit this year of $1.65 trillion. We are awash in debt. It is America's No. 1 problem. Even the administration has said our national debt is our No. 1 threat to our national security at this point. We have to get our fiscal house in order.

Voting to cut our own budget by 5 percent is wonderful. It is a first step. It is about $1 million--a couple million dollars. It will not put a dent in the overall problem.

If we were truly concerned as a body about our deficit, we could cut the entire budget by 5 percent. It has gone up by 25 percent in the last couple years.

If we were to cut our entire budget by 5 percent, it would be about $200 billion. That is what I am proposing, a $200 billion cut in spending.

Are we bold enough? Will we do it? If we do not do it, what happens? My fear is, if we do not have significant cuts in Federal spending, that ultimately in the next few years we could have a debt crisis. This amendment will give us a chance, will give the Members of this body a chance to say: Are we serious? Are we serious about addressing the debt problem or do we only want to do token things such as cutting our legislative budget 5 percent?

It is a good start, but it is not enough. This was actually only a sense-of-the-Senate resolution, so we didn't cut our budget by 5 percent. We said we might be in favor of that. This would be a real cut, $200 billion.

I hope the Senate will support it.

I yield the floor.