Representative Jerrold Nadler, Chairman of the Constitution Subcommittee in the House of Representatives, took to the floor of the House of Representatives yesterday to explain why he would not comply with requests to vote for reauthorization of the Patriot Act without reform:

Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this motion to concur in the Senate amendment, which would extend for a period of 1 year the sunset of three provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act.

I very much regret that we have to be here today in this situation and that I have to oppose this legislation. I understand we are facing a deadline of this weekend, but I also believe that we have an obligation to do more than punt. That is effectively what we are doing today. We are punting this question to the next Congress.

Both the House and the Senate have worked hard to examine not just these three provisions, but the entire PATRIOT Act, and to craft legislation that would improve its effectiveness, and that would better protect the civil liberties of all Americans. That process should be allowed to continue. Today, with this vote, that process effectively ends.

The PATRIOT Act was passed at a time of panic, and in an extremely rushed manner. Many of its provisions
were not well thought out, which is why Congress decided that certain parts of the PATRIOT Act should be
enacted on a temporary basis so that we could revisit them after we had time to see how they worked.

The original passage of the bill in 2001 was hijacked at the last minute in a way that should have stood as an embarrassment to the House. The Judiciary Committee back then reported the bill unanimously, with support from the most conservative to the most liberal members. We did business the way the American people have always said they wanted us to do business, through negotiation and compromise in open committee meetings.

That was the high point. The low point came in the dead of night. Then-Attorney General Ashcroft objected to the bill, and so with the cooperation of the then-Republican leadership that bill was junked, and the bill that came to the floor was an entirely new bill written behind closed doors and not seen until shortly before we voted on it on the floor.

The bill that recently passed the Judiciary Committee would have extended the expiring provisions, but would have improved them in response to the problems that experience has brought to light. With respect to roving
wiretaps, for example, the committee extended the provision until 2013, and added language to clarify congressional intent that the government must describe its roving target with a sufficient degree of particularity to allow a judge to be able to distinguish the target from other potential users of places or facilities to be surveilled.

Our bill would have allowed the ‘‘lone wolf’’ provision of FISA to sunset. This provision allows the issuance of a FISA warrant against individuals with no connection to a foreign power or other foreign entity or to a terrorist group. That is not the purpose of FISA, and in fact Todd Hinnen, Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s National Security Division, testified in the hearing before my subcommittee that this provision has never been used in the 8 years in which it has been enforced. There is no reason why a so-called ‘‘lone wolf,’’ concededly unconnected, not connected to a foreign power, not connected, concededly,
to a terrorist group—otherwise he wouldn’t be a lone wolf—there is no reason why such a person could not be
subject to a normal Title III wiretap warrant. That is why the committee voted to let this provision sunset.

We also added some procedural protections to section 215 orders which allow the government to seize all sorts of information concerning what an individual has been reading without a warrant. The bill would have required the President to report to Congress on whether the procedures for sensitive collections could be further modified so as to enhance civil liberties protections without undermining national security objectives. This provision was also extended to the end of 2013 in the legislation reported by the Judiciary Committee.

My bill controlling the use of the much-abused National Security Letters was included in this bill as well. These
letters, issued with no court oversight, have been used to obtain all sorts of material, and have been joined with gag orders on the recipients, gag orders that were recently struck down as unconstitutional by the courts. The Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General has issued some damning reports on the misuse of these letters, and the section is in dire need of reform.

These reforms, which were a part of the bill reported by the Judiciary Committee, should be part of any legislative action extending these provisions of the PATRIOT Act. I regret that we are not going to continue
this process of improving the PATRIOT Act. I regret we do not have before us a very short-term extension designed to give us more time to finish this work in the balance of this Congress. But we are punting to the next Congress, which for all practical purposes means that we are extending the PATRIOT Act unchanged for the indefinite future. I believe that our Nation and our liberties will suffer as a result of this.

I hope that this vote today, contrary to what I expect, will not stop my colleagues from continuing to improve our intelligence gathering laws, and specifically continuing to examine and improve the PATRIOT Act in a timely manner.

Rep. Nadler referred to the “embarrassment to the House” of 2001, when Republican leadership of the Congress junked a reformed bill brought through the committee process and substituted the unmitigatedly unconstitutional Patriot Act in its place. Yesterday, the Democratic leadership of the 111th Congress similarly junked a reform bill brought through committee, and substituted the same old intrusive and unconstitutional Patriot Act provisions in its place. Nadler’s message is clear: those who were behind this move should be red with embarrassment.