Student Success Act - Conference Report
Floor Speech
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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I am astonished by the proposition of our friend the Senator from Connecticut that you can be on a secret watch list by the Federal Government, and just by virtue of this secret listing of an individual on a government watch list, you can be denied some of your core constitutional rights without any necessity of the government establishing probable cause or producing any evidence that would justify the denial of a core constitutional right. I guess if it is good enough to take the government's word by this list without proof or showing of probable cause to deny a citizen their constitutional rights under the Second Amendment, then I guess that is good enough to deny a citizen's right to worship according to the dictates of their conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of association, and all of the other rights enumerated in the Constitution. It is an outrageous proposition.
I would say to my friend, if these people on this government watch list are truly dangerous, why isn't the Obama administration and the Obama Justice Department indicting them, taking them to court, trying them, and convicting them of crimes? Instead, you have this secret watch list, without any proof, without any evidence.
I would just say that the Senator has mischaracterized the amendment which I proposed last week and which I have now offered by unanimous consent.
What would happen is, if an individual on the watch list goes in to purchase a gun, there would be the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, which would then access the watch list. If the Department of Justice was worried, based on that notice, that somebody was attempting to buy a gun, they could intervene for 72 hours to stop the individual from purchasing the gun. If they were further worried about this individual, they could go to court and, before a Federal judge, produce evidence to justify the detention of that individual to take them off the street. This is a complete response to the concerns raised by our friends across the aisle.
But I will tell you what is really motivating all of this. First of all, the Feinstein amendment which was offered last week was a complete substitute to the ObamaCare repeal bill that we voted on and passed last week. As such, this was a surreptitious means to try to defeat our ability to repeal the abomination known as ObamaCare, which has only a 37-percent approval rating, and our colleagues across the aisle knew that. Under the Senate procedures, a complete substitute to the reconciliation bill that we passed last week would have been accomplished if the Feinstein amendment had been agreed to.
But they went even further and are trying to distract the American people from the fact that the President of the United States and Commander in Chief has absolutely no strategy to deal with the threat of ISIS here in the United States. I presume the immediate motivation was what happened in San Bernardino, the terrible tragedy, but our colleagues across the aisle are trying to capitalize on that particular tragedy in order to justify this unconstitutional attempt to deny American citizens their core constitutional rights without any proof and without any evidence.
I would just add that if our friends across the aisle think this watch list is so perfect and so infallible, they ought to read an editorial that was produced by the New York Times in 2014 where the American Civil Liberties Union and others objected to the watch list as being a secret government list without any evidence or any proof. They cited a 2007 audit of the 71,000 people on the government watch list and noted that half of those 71,000 were erroneously included in the watch list.
So we all understand what is going on here. This isn't about finding solutions to real problems; this is about trying to change the subject and to distract the American people from the fact that the President and this administration have absolutely no strategy to deal with the threat of ISIS and the President tells us merely to stay the course. So I understand what is going on.
I also would say that the other main purpose of our friends across the aisle, other than to defeat our ability to repeal ObamaCare, which we successfully did in the Senate last week, is to create a ``gotcha'' moment for Senators and candidates who are running in 2016. Already, the Senator from Connecticut has appeared on national news shows, the President of the United States in his weekly speech to the Nation, and the Senate Democratic leader have already misrepresented what was in the Cornyn substitute to the Feinstein amendment last week to suggest that people who voted against the Feinstein amendment really, really wanted to make sure that terrorists got guns. That is an outrageous accusation, and it is as false as it is outrageous.
So I think it is pretty obvious what is going on here. This is an effort to undermine our ability to repeal ObamaCare. It is an effort to distract from the fact that the President of the United States, the Commander in Chief, has no strategy to defeat ISIS. In fact, the Democratic leader said yesterday that really what we need is an ISIS czar. An ISIS czar? I thought that is the job of the Commander in Chief, the President of the United States, to fight and win the Nation's wars and to keep us safe here at home. Give me a break. Then this foolish idea that we ought to simply take the Federal Government's word without any proof or any necessity of producing evidence in a court of law and meeting some basic minimal legal standard before we deny American citizens their core constitutional rights is just outrageous.
So, Mr. President, I think it is pretty obvious what is going on here, and I am happy to have the American people render their judgment. For that reason, I object.
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