Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
Floor Speech
FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE SURVEILLANCE ACT -- (Senate - February 13, 2008)
Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, with regard to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, it passed in the Senate yesterday 68 to 29--an overwhelming bipartisan ratification of the Rockefeller-Bond bipartisan compromise to get us a permanent Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in place. There were a number of efforts to weaken the bill on the floor of the Senate. They were all defeated on a bipartisan basis. Most of them were defeated by a margin of 2 to 1.
Over in the House, we have heard from 21 Democratic Members, the ``Blue Dogs,'' who say the House ought to take up this overwhelmingly bipartisan Senate bill and pass it and send it to the President for his signature.
We had an important bipartisan victory just last week on the stimulus package. We have an opportunity to do it again this week on this extraordinarily important piece of legislation.
In thinking about how long we have been dealing with this legislation, we passed a short-term extension back in August. We have had 6 months to figure out what we wanted to do. We passed extremely important legislation--probably the most important piece of legislation we will pass this Congress--yesterday on an overwhelming bipartisan vote. The House of Representatives surely has followed what we have done. There is a bipartisan majority in the House of Representatives for what we did yesterday in the Senate. We know that. There is a bipartisan majority in the House of Representatives to take up and pass the Senate-passed bill in the House of Representatives now. That is what we know. That is what I hope will be done. The House will have an opportunity over the next couple of days to make its decision. But I think the President has correctly assessed the situation and decided we have had ample time to deal with this legislation, to find out how we felt about it, to vote on it, to make whatever changes people thought were appropriate. And we know there is a bipartisan majority in the House waiting to pass it. I hope they will be given that opportunity later this week.
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