Rand Paul

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Some will criticize this exercise of keeping the Senate awake at night. The rumblings can be heard, but what I would say is that the future of the country is worth the time spent. One of the reasons we are spending the middle of the night discussing this is that we don't have an ordinary process for proposals. We don't have an ordinary process for amending bills. Were there to be an ordinary process where conservatives would be allowed an alternative such as cut, cap, and balance--we actually did that in 2011 when the opposite party was in charge. We did have a vote on cut, cap, and balance. It actually passed. It passed in the House overwhelmingly and was defeated in the Senate, but the fact is there are other alternatives. There isn't just one alternative. The only alternative shouldn't be that we continue to go further and further into debt. Sometimes people say: Well, I can't even conceive of $1 trillion. It is just this enormous money, this enormous amount of money. What is $1 trillion? To illustrate what $1 trillion is, imagine if you had thousand-dollar bills in your hand and you had thousand-dollar bills stacked four inches high. That would be $1 million. But if you want to imagine $1 trillion, in thousand-dollar bills it would be 63 miles high. That is what we are talking about adding. While they have not specified how much debt they are going to burden us with, many are estimating that it will be over $1 trillion. So when you think about what your government is doing to you tonight, think about how much of a burden of debt the next generation will get in just the next year, just from this bill over the next year and a half--over $1 trillion. If you want to know how much that is, imagine thousand- dollar bills stacked 63 miles high. That is the burden we are passing on to the next generation. None of this is an argument for no government. None of this is an argument for no Federal Government. In fact, this is an argument for just spending what comes in. We actually have a lot of money that comes in; $3 trillion comes in. Could we not simply live with the $3 trillion that comes in? What would happen to the country if we only spent what comes in? Would there be some sort of calamity? I think it would actually be the opposite. I think it would send a signal to the world that we are serious, that we are going to make America great again. America's greatness was founded upon fiscal sanity, small government. Liberty thrives when government is small. We need a government that is small and restrained by the Constitution. If we had a government that was restrained by the Constitution, we wouldn't be in this fix. Many of the functions of government we do up here are not written into the Constitution and were never delegated to the Federal Government. The reason we have gotten into this fix is because we have gotten away from the confines of the Constitution. Jefferson once said that the chains of the Constitution will bind government. Patrick Henry said that the Constitution is not about restraining the people; the Constitution was intended to restrain the government. There has been a long history of this. This is not something that has occurred overnight. If you want to go back and see the history of people trying to restrain their government and keep their government small, you can probably go back to the plains of Runnymede in 1215. When the Magna Carta was passed, that was one of the first explicit sort of explosions of people saying to government enough is enough; the king does not have unlimited power. This goes against the character and the charter of the Magna Carta, which tried to limit the power of the monarch. Instead, we are giving unlimited power to borrow to the President. So if you look at the character of the Magna Carta and you look at the character of our Founding Fathers, who wanted to have restraint, who wanted government to be restrained by rules, what you find is that we are going headlong in the wrong direction. What we need is to obey the Constitution once again. When we obey the Constitution, I think what would happen is that the budget would balance almost automatically. It would balance every year. Washington does need to have compromise, but this is the wrong kind of compromise. The compromise is going in the wrong direction. What we need is compromise that actually reduces spending. Instead, we have compromise, or so-called compromise, that is actually increasing spending. This deal will give the President unspecified and unlimited power to borrow money without limits. In the President's last year in office he will be able to borrow whatever--no limits whatsoever. We are abdicating our role as a constitutional body to limit and check the power of the Presidency with this. Some will say: Oh, you are only saying this because it is a President of the opposite party. I would be saying this if it were a President of either party because we have allowed too much power to gravitate to the Presidency, and this allows even more. Will the Parliamentarian give an update on the time remaining.

Mr. PAUL. In the remaining time, I would like to talk about a budget point of order that I will be putting forward. This legislation does something that many in this body have been critical of in the past. It actually takes money from the obligations to Social Security and transfers them to a more immediate program. Specifically written into the budget rules, though, were rules that say: If you are going to take money, if you are going to steal money from Social Security, from people who are retired and who have put it in there, and you are going to spend it on something else, there is a special budget point of order that says in order to do this you will need 60 votes. So we will be putting forward a budget resolution that says: If you are going to steal money from Social Security, if you are going to take money from Social Security and you are going to spend it on other concerns--people will say: Oh, well, we are going to spend it on disability. Well, the Social Security fund was put forward as a pension plan. You have an obligation to those who put the money in. So stealing money from people who will be getting money in the future to pay for immediate concerns is robbing Peter to pay Paul. So those in this body will be asked tonight to vote on whether or not you are willing to vote to take money from Social Security to spend it on immediate concerns. This is sort of like saying: All right, I have a pension fund. Let's say I have $100,000 in my pension plan, but I want to go to the racetrack and I need some money this week. So I am willing to take the $100,000 out, and I am willing to pay a $30,000 penalty. I am willing to do it because I am an addict, and I am addicted to spending, and I have to spend the money now. That is what it is, and you are all guilty of it, right and left. You are going to take money out of the Social Security fund, and you are going to spend it on an immediate fix. And by fix, I mean not fixing the program. By fix, I mean what a junkie does. A junkie is addicted to spending. That is what the problem is here, that we are addicted to spending. So, Madam President, at this point I raise a point of order against the pending motion pursuant to section 311(a) of S. Con. Res. 11, the concurrent resolution on the budget for fiscal year 2016. The legislation reallocates payroll between the retirement and disability programs and therefore breaches the budget act. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, the number one threat to our country's future is our debt. The number one threat to our national security is our debt. This deal gives the President the power to borrow unlimited amounts of money. This deal represents the worst of Washington culture. The left and the right have come together in an unholy alliance to explode the debt. The left gets more welfare, the right gets more military contracts, and the taxpayer is stuck with the deal. This is a bipartisan busting of the budget caps that will further indenture our next generation. I promised the voters of Kentucky to oppose deficits, to oppose budgets that don't balance, and to spend only that which comes in. I will not give this President any power to borrow unspecified amounts of money. Our debt now equals our entire economy. Not raising the debt ceiling means we would be forced to only spend what comes in--also known as a balanced budget. I could accept that. But I can also accept a balanced budget that brings us to balance over 5 years. The debt threatens us like never before, and now is the time to take a stand. I have traveled far and wide across America. I have not met one voter outside of DC who supports adding an unlimited increase to the debt ceiling. I hope my colleagues will listen and will listen very clearly to their constituents before voting for this terrible, rotten, no-good deal. The time is now to take a stand. The time is now to say enough is enough--no more debt. The very foundation of our country is threatened by the addition of debt. This is precisely the time when we should be using the leverage of raising the debt ceiling to exact budgetary reforms. In 2011, that is exactly what we did. We had a compromise that worked in the right direction. We had a compromise that said we will set limits on both the military and the domestic spending. Instead, what we have today is an unholy alliance of right and left. We wonder why the deficit grows no matter which party is involved, no matter which party is in charge. The deficit continues to grow because, frankly, many are not serious about reducing the debt. Many up here are serious only about increasing spending for their sacred cow. The true compromise that is necessary in America is for both right and left to say enough is enough, to say that the particular interests they have in spending money is hurting the country. It is time for the right to say: You know what; the country is not stronger by going further in debt. The country actually, I believe, is weaker. We do not project power from bankruptcy court. I think the time is now. Enough is enough. We shouldn't be adding more debt. The left needs to acknowledge this as well. The left may say this is for humanitarian purposes, we want to help people. I don't doubt their motives, but I do doubt whether you can help people from bankruptcy court. I think we are weakening our country. One of the reasons why we have been able to help so many people in our country is that we are the richest, most humanitarian country in the history of mankind. In the year 2014 alone, we gave away nearly $400 billion in private charity in this country. I fear that will not continue to last. I fear that as this deficit mounts, as the debt mounts, they will drag us down. Already some economists estimate that we are losing a million jobs a year because of the burden of debt. I think what we need to do is to have compromise in Washington, but the compromise needs to be that the right and the left need to say we don't have enough money at this point. Some say we need to have military readiness. But this week in the Armed Services Committee, they talked about $20 billion of waste in one program within the military. We have had Secretaries of the Cabinet Departments and a Secretary of the Navy saying: You know what; we can save money within the Pentagon. But if we keep adding to the top line, if we keep adding more money, if we keep spending good money after bad, we are going to bankrupt the country. I hope my colleagues will listen to their constituents, because I have been in 40 of the 50 States and I have yet to meet a single voter who says: Keep adding to the debt; keep spending more money. What I find is the opposite. They say: Work together to save the country. Work together not to add more debt. This debt ceiling vote does something that is unprecedented. It doesn't even add a certain amount to the debt. It adds an unspecified amount. Over the next year or year and a half, we will add as much debt as can be crammed into the budget, as much money as can be spent. There will be no limit. We are giving an unspecified amount of borrowing power to the President. I don't care whether it is a Democratic President or a Republican President. It is unconscionable to give unlimited borrowing authority to the President. As we contemplate this decision, we need to think beyond the short term. We need to think beyond the short term of self-constituencies on either side of the aisle and say enough is enough. We don't have the money. Let's take a stand now and try to reform the process before it is too late.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I agree with the Senator from Oregon that bipartisan agreement is necessary in this body, but I think we have in this agreement bipartisan agreement in the wrong direction. The bipartisan agreement we need is to conserve across the board, for both sides to say that our sacred cow, whether it is military on the right or domestic spending on the left--that they all will have to be conserved. We will not be able to spend money we don't have. I think we are becoming weaker as a nation the more we borrow. If we pass this bill, it is not a difference or a choice between calamity and continuing to add to the debt--which this bill will do. I fully believe we can continue to make our payments. We have $250 billion a month that comes in. Interest payments are $30 billion. There is absolutely no reason we would ever default. In fact, I have a bill called the Default Protection Act, which would ensure that Social Security, Medicare, our soldiers' salaries, and the interest on the debt were paid for. So I think what we should be doing is doing the opposite kind of compromise. Right and left should come together and say: You know what. I really want spending on this. The right says: I really want spending on the military. They should come together and say: You know what. We don't have any money. We are borrowing $1 million every minute. So I think this bipartisan compromise goes in the wrong direction. What I would ask for is a bipartisan compromise to actually save money and borrow less.

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I rise today in opposition to raising the debt ceiling. I rise particularly in opposition to raising the debt ceiling without getting any sort of spending reform or budgetary reform in return. In fact, it will be completely the opposite. We will be raising the debt ceiling in an unlimited fashion. We will be giving President Obama a free pass to borrow as much money as he can borrow in the last year of his office--no dollar limit. Here you go, President Obama, spend what you want. We do this while also exceeding what are called budget caps. We have been trying to have spending restraint in Washington. It hasn't worked very well, but at least there are some numbers the government is not supposed to exceed. These include spending caps for military spending as well as domestic spending. When I first arrived in 2010, I was part of the movement called the tea party movement. We came into prominence, and I was elected primarily because I was concerned about the debt, worried about the debt we were leaving to our kids and our grandkids, worried that we were destroying the very fabric of the country with debt. We came here in 2010, and we negotiated and negotiated, and President Obama said: I won't negotiate with you. I won't negotiate with a gun to my head. The media said: You always have to raise the debt ceiling. It is irresponsible to use that as leverage to get reform. But you know what. We did get reform. The conservatives put together something called cut, cap, and balance. It was passed overwhelmingly in the House, blocked in the Senate, but ultimately there was something passed called sequestration, which put caps on both military and domestic spending. It did slow down the rate of growth in government for a little while. This is the problem with Congress: Congress will occasionally do something in the right direction, and then they take one step forward and two steps back. In 2013 we gave up on the sequester and we added back in about $60 billion worth of money. Now they are doing the same thing again. This time we are going to add back in $80 billion--$50 billion in 2016 and another $30 billion in 2017. We are doing the opposite of what we should be doing. We should be using the leverage of the debt ceiling by saying: We are not raising it again until you reform your ways, until you begin spending only the money you have. Instead, we are saying: Here, Mr. President. You can raise the debt as much as you want. You can spend as much as you want while you are in office, and we are going to do nothing. In fact, we are going to help you. We are going to exceed the caps so everybody gets what they want. So everyone in Washington is going to get something. The right is going to get more military money, the left is going to get more welfare money, the secret handshake goes on, and the American public gets stuck with the bill. I think one of the most important things that we do is defend the country. If you ask me to prioritize the spending, I will say we have to defend the country above and beyond and before all else. But that doesn't mean we are stronger or safer if we are doing this from bankruptcy court. I think the No. 1 threat to our country, the No. 1 threat to our security is debt, this piling on of debt. The debt threatens our national security. Yet we just want to pile it on and pile it on. This deal will do nothing but explode the debt. In fact, it doesn't even limit how much the debt can go up. We are giving the President a blank check. We are in the middle of a filibuster. This filibuster will go on until about 1:00 in the morning, and then we will find out who the true conservatives in this town are. If you are conservative, you will say: There is no way I am going to vote to give an unlimited power to the President to borrow money. If you are a conservative, you are going to say: We shouldn't be exceeding the budget caps; if anything, we should be passing more stringent budget caps. It disappoints me greater than I can possibly express that the party I belong to that should be the conservative party doesn't appear to be conservative. This is a big problem. I am traveling the country, and I have asked Republicans everywhere. I have yet to meet a single Republican who supports this deal. In the House, they voted on this yesterday. Do you know what the vote was? Two to one among Republicans say that this is a god-awful deal and that we shouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole. It is a terrible deal. House Republicans understood this. We should be doing the opposite. We should be taking the leverage of saying we are not going to raise the debt ceiling unless we get reform. Instead, we went to the President and said: Here, raise the debt ceiling as much as you can possibly spend over the next year, and we will let you exceed the budget caps. It is irresponsible. It shows a lack of concern for our country, for the debt, and it should go down in defeat. When I ran for office in 2010, the debt was an enormous issue. The debt was $10 trillion. Some of us in the tea party were concerned because it had doubled in the last 8 years. It doubled from $5 to $10 trillion under a Republican administration. Many of us were adamant that Republicans needed to do a better job. We had added new entitlement programs, we added new spending, and the deficit got worse under Republicans. Now we are under a Democratic President and it is set to double again. This President will add more to the debt than all of the previous Presidents combined. So we will go from $10 trillion now to nearly $20 trillion. We may get close to $20 trillion, and now that we have increased the debt ceiling an unspecified amount, we may well get to $20 trillion by the time this President leaves. Is that a problem? Some people say: It is just a big number. I don't know what $1 trillion is. If you want to imagine $1 trillion, take thousand-dollar bills and put them in your hand. Thousand-dollar bills 4 inches high is $1 million. If you want to have $1 trillion in thousand-dollar bills, it would be 63 miles high. We are talking about an amount of money that is hard to fathom. You say: What does that mean? How does that hurt me or my family? Economists say we are losing 1 million jobs a year through the burden of debt. Economists also say that when your debt becomes as large as your economy, you are in a worrisome place; that when the debt is as large as the economy, there is a possibility that you may enter into a period where you might suffer a panic or a collapse or a burden so great that your economy can't withstand it. In 2008 we were very close to a panic. I think we get closer with each day. The No. 1 priority up here shouldn't be trying to scrounge around and find new money to spend. It should be trying to conserve. It should be doing something that some say is radical but I say is the absolute essence of common sense; that is, we should spend what comes in. So often up here, things become partisan and people just want to point fingers and say: Oh, it is that party that did it; they are the ones responsible for the debt. But I want to let you in on a secret. This is a secret that goes on and on and on up here. It is something I call the unholy alliance. It is the unholy alliance between right and left--they both have sacred cows they want to spend money on. Instead of saying: The debt is a real problem, and we both have to conserve in both areas, they get together secretly and raise the money for their sacred cows. So on the right we are busting the limits because the right wants more military spending. The left wants more for welfare. The unholy alliance is the secret handshake. And what gets worse? The debt. We are borrowing $1 million every minute, and it is not going to end in a pretty way. What do other conservatives have to say about this deal? Stephen Moore at the Heritage Foundation writes: ``It is the worst budget deal to be negotiated by the GOP since George H.W. Bush violated his `no new taxes' pledge in 1990.'' Rush Limbaugh says: ``The Republican party cannot campaign by running around blaming the Democrats for destroying the budget, for overspending, for threatening the very fabric of the country.'' They can't do it because they are now complicit. We can't point fingers and say the Democrats are the big spenders. We now, by this deal, become complicit. We become equally guilty of supporting new debt. Some say: Well, gosh, you have to raise the debt ceiling, right? If you don't raise the debt ceiling, there will be a default. Hogwash. Do you know how much money comes into this place every month through taxes? About $250 billion comes in in taxes. Do you know what our interest payment is? About $30 billion, might be as high as $60, $70, $80 billion. There is never not enough revenue to pay for interest. People say we couldn't pay for everything. I say maybe we shouldn't spend it on everything. We have plenty of money that comes in every month to spend on interest, to spend on Medicare, to spend on Social Security, and to spend on soldiers' salaries and veterans affairs and the rest, but maybe government shouldn't be doing much else. These are the questions we would have to ask: What would happen if the debt ceiling didn't go up? We would have a balanced budget. How bad would that be? If your debt ceiling didn't go up, you would spend what comes in. That is what every American family does--they spend what comes in. I think this is absolutely what we need to do, but even I am willing to compromise, so I have put forward a compromise. I put forward a compromise that we tried in 2011 called cut, cap, and balance. My compromise would cut the deficit in half in 1 year--a dramatic lessening of the burden of debt. That is the cut. The cap is that my bill would actually cap spending at 18 percent of GDP--18 percent of the total amount of money spent on the economy. Why did we pick 18 percent? Because that leads to a balanced budget. The last part of my bill of cut, cap, and balance is we would pass a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. I have kind of jokingly said--but probably seriously--if we pass a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution and we pass term limits, I will go back to being a doctor, which is my first love anyway. We have to fix the country. We are destroying the country with debt. We are drowning in a sea of debt, and neither party seems to be concerned with it anymore. So what I would do is I would say, yes, I will compromise. I will raise the debt ceiling under these three conditions: cut the deficit in half, cap the spending, and pass a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. People say: Well, there aren't the votes for that. Why don't we have a vote? Why don't we allow a vote on cut, cap, and balance, the conservative alternative to this deal we have on the floor? Why don't we vote on an alternative? Because there won't be any amendments allowed. This will be pushed through without amendments. I really object to that. This is supposed to be a body of deliberation. We are supposed to be able to deliberate over how we are going to fix the problems of the country. And I think this is the No. 1 threat to us. We are accumulating debt at $1 million every minute. Someone has to stand up and do something about it. Taxpayers for Common Sense says about this: ``We're not a fan of the Bipartisan Budget Agreement of 2015.'' CATO writes: ``The Gipper's [Ronald Reagan's] ghost is probably looking down from heaven at the new budget deal between congressional leaders and the Obama administration and saying `there they go again.''' ``So let's rephrase the question: What do advocates of fiscal restraint get in exchange [for raising these spending caps]? Well, if you peruse [this] agreement, it's apparent they don't get anything.'' What we have traded is an increase in the debt ceiling--not just an increase, an unspecified increase in the debt ceiling. We have said to President Obama: You can spend as much money as you want throughout the rest of your Presidency--no limits. The National Taxpayers Union writes: If the question on the budget and debt ceiling package is ``Deal or No Deal?'' taxpayers should clearly opt for the latter. While the agreement contains a few meritorious provisions, it fails other sufficient savings and structural reforms necessary to address our Nation's $18.1 trillion debt problem. The debt is without question the No. 1 problem in the country. We will have a vote this evening, and that vote will be: Do you care? Are you willing to do something to slow it down? Do you think we ought to use the leverage of the debt ceiling to slow down spending or are you a profligate spender who will vote to bust the caps and who will vote to give President Obama unlimited borrowing authority? I think it is a clear-cut question. I will vote no, and I will continue this filibuster as long as there are enough votes to allow it to continue. Unanimous Consent Request--S. 2182 Mr. President, at this point, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of my bill, Cut, Cap, and Balance, which is Calendar No. 274, S. 2182. I further ask that there be 1 hour of debate equally divided in the usual form; that following the use or yielding back of time the bill be read a third time and passed and the motion to reconsider be made and laid upon the table.

Mr. PAUL

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

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, this cyber security bill attempts to enhance security for transactions on the Internet but I think actually weakens privacy in the process. The bill would grant legal immunity to companies that, in sharing information, actually violate your privacy. Most companies have a privacy agreement. You see it when you get on the Internet. It is supposed to guarantee that your information, individual choices, and consumer choices on the Internet are not revealed to anyone. This bill says that if the company violates it in sharing your information, there will be legal immunity for that company. I think that weakens privacy. It makes the privacy agreement not really worth the paper it is written on. I think privacy is of great concern to Americans. The government doesn't have a very good record with privacy. In the news today, a teenager is now reading the email of the CIA Director. It doesn't sound as though the government is very good at protecting privacy. I am not really excited about letting them have more information. The government revealed 20 million individual records of their employees, private records of their employees. This is the same government that now says: Trust us, and let's give everybody involved immunity so the consumer has no recourse if their privacy is breached. This is the same government that allowed the ObamaCare Web site to be hacked and looked at. This is a government that doesn't have a lot of concern or ability to protect privacy. We are now asked to entrust this government with volumes and volumes of personal information sent across the vastness of the Internet. There is good reason that many of our largest technological companies oppose this legislation. My amendment will give companies and Internet users clarity on what information is shared with the government, and it will protect the privacy agreement.

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, let us be clear that most of the high-tech companies that have anything to do with the Internet and anything to do with information sharing oppose this bill.

Mr. PAUL. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. PAUL

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

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I am reminded of that famous line from ``Cool Hand Luke'': ``What we have here is a failure to communicate.'' What we have here in Congress is a failure to legislate, a failure to exert congressional authority. What we have here is a failure to use our leverage. What we have here is a failure to use the power of the purse. Conservatives across America are unhappy, and rightly so. We were told that when we took over Congress, when Republicans were elected to Congress, that things would be different: that if voters put us in charge, we would right the ship, we would stop the deficits. And here we are with another continuing resolution. What is a continuing resolution? It is a continuation of the deficit spending of the past. It is a continuation of the waste. It is a continuation of the duplication. What is a continuing resolution? It is a steaming pile of the same old, same old. Let me be clear: A continuing resolution is not a good thing. It is more of the status quo. It is a warmed-over version of yesterday's failures. It is an abdication of congressional authority. It is an abdication of congressional power. Let's at least be honest. With a continuing resolution, no waste will be cut, no spending will be cut, no regulations will be stopped, and the debt will continue to mount. We are told that we cannot win, that we need 60 votes to defund anything, but perhaps there is an alternate future where courage steps up and saves the day. All spending is set to expire automatically. This is the perfect time to turn the tables, to tell the other side that they will need 60 votes to affirmatively spend any money. See, it doesn't have to be 60 votes to stop things. All spending will expire, and only those programs for which we can get 60 votes should go forward. What would that mean? That would mean an elimination of waste, an elimination of duplication, an elimination of bad things that we spend money on. If we had the courage, we could use the Senate's supermajority rules to stop wasteful spending. If we had the courage, we could force the other side to come up with 60 votes to fund things like Planned Parenthood. The budget is loaded with nonsense and waste. Some will say our job is to govern, to preside. But to preside over what? To preside over a mountain of new debt? To be the same as the other side--to continue to add debt after debt? Our debt will consume us if we continue to preside over the status quo. It is as if we are on the Titanic and just simply reshuffling the chairs. A continuing resolution continues the wasteful spending of money. I can go on and on about what we are wasting money on. I will tell of a few. We spent $300,000 last year studying whether Japanese quail are more sexually promiscuous on cocaine. I think we could poll the audience and save money. These things should never have had money spent on them, but if we do a continuing resolution, it will continue. We spent several hundred thousand dollars studying whether we can relieve stress in Vietnamese villagers by having them watch American television reruns. I don't know about you, but I don't want one penny of taxpayer dollars going to this ridiculous stuff. If we continue, if we pass a continuing resolution, no reform will occur. We spent $800,000 in the last couple of years developing a televised cricket league for Afghanistan--$800,000. Do you know how many people have a television in Afghanistan? One in 10,000 people. And I don't care if they all have TVs, it is ridiculous that our money, which we don't even have--we have to borrow it from China to send it to Afghanistan. If we pass a continuing resolution, we are agreeing to continue this nonsense. We spent $150,000 last year on yoga classes for Federal employees. So not only do we pay them nearly 1.5 times as much as private-sector employees, we give them yoga classes. If we pass a continuing resolution, this goes on and on. Nothing will change. The status quo will continue, and we will continue to spend ourselves into oblivion. We spent $250,000 last year inviting 24 kids from Pakistan to go to space camp in Alabama. We borrow money from China to send it to Pakistan. It is crazy, it is ridiculous, and it should stop. We have the power to stop it. Congress has the power to spend money or not spend money, and yet we roll over and we say: It must continue; we don't have the votes to stop it. Nonsense. The other side doesn't have the votes to continue the spending if we would stand up and challenge them. We spent $500,000 last year or the year before developing a menu for when we colonize Mars. We sent a bunch of college students to Hawaii to study this. We paid $5,000 apiece. They got 2 weeks all expenses paid in Hawaii. And do you know what a bunch of college kids came up with? Pizza. This is where your money is going. I could go on, hundreds and hundreds of programs. If we do not exert the power of the purse, this continues. We should attach to all 12 individual spending bills--not glommed together--we should attach hundreds of instructions, thousands of instructions. Now, some of the media have said: Well, those would be riders on appropriations bills. Exactly. That is the power of the purse. If you object to the President writing regulations without our authority, Congress should defund the regulations. Congress should instruct him on ObamaCare, on what we object to. Congress should instruct him that we don't want money spent on Planned Parenthood. Hundreds and hundreds of instructions should be written into every bill and passed and sent to him. Would we win all of these battles? Do we have the power to win every battle and defund everything we want? No. But do you know what we start out with? Our negotiating position right now is, we start out with defunding nothing. Why don't we start out with a negotiating position that we defund everything that is objectionable? All the wasteful spending, all the duplicative spending, let's defund it all. If there has to be a negotiation, let's start from defunding it all and see where we get, but it would take courage because we would have to let spending expire. If we are not willing to let the spending expire and start anew, we have no leverage. The power of the purse is there only if you have courage. We must have the courage of convictions to say enough is enough, that the debt is a greater threat to us than letting spending expire. Now, several will report on this speech and say: Oh, he wants to shut down government. No, I don't. I just want to exert the power of the purse, and that means spending must expire. I am all for renewing the spending, but let's renew only the spending that makes sense. We have the power of the purse if we choose to exert it. Look at the mountain of debt. Look at the debt that continues to be added up. We have not been doing our job. The way we are supposed to spend money in Congress is 12 individual appropriations bills. They have passed out of committee. Why aren't they presented on the floor? The Democrats have filibustered the only one presented. Let's present every one of them, and let the public know--let everyone in America know--that it is Democrats filibustering the spending bills. It is Democrats who desire to shut down government. It is Democrats who desire not to have any restrictions on where the money is spent. It is Democrats who are saying: We don't want to end wasteful spending. We don't want to end any spending. We don't want any controls over spending. We want to continue the status quo. But we should not be complicit with them. We have allowed this to go on for too long. It threatens the very heart of the Republic. It threatens our very foundation to continue to borrow $1 million a minute. It is time that we stood up. It is time that we took a stand and said enough is enough. When is the last time we did it in the appropriate fashion? When is the last time Congress passed each of the individual appropriations bills with instructions on how to spend the money? It was 2005, a decade ago. It has been a decade. In the last decade we have added nearly $10 trillion in new debt. It is time to take a stand. I, for one, have had enough. I have had enough. I am not going to vote for a continuing resolution. A continuing resolution is simply a continuation of the mounting debt. I, for one, will not do it. A continuing resolution is retreat. It is announcing your defeat in advance. What we should do is take a stand. We should say to the other side: In the Senate, it requires a supermajority. What does that mean? It means 60 votes to pass spending. What would happen? Spending that is controversial, like Planned Parenthood, would fall away. They can ask for private donations. Good luck on that. You wouldn't find things being funded that are controversial. What would happen is there would no longer be funding for wasteful and duplicative projects. We listed these a couple years ago. I think we had $7 billion worth of just duplication. Did we fix it? No. Every year the President--even this President--puts forward $10, $15, $20 billion worth of programs that could be eliminated. Do they ever get eliminated? No, because Congress is dysfunctional and we continue to pass a continuing resolution, which means we do nothing to exert the power of the purse. Congress is a shadow of what it once was. Madison said that we would have coequal branches and we would pit ambition against ambition. We no longer do that. Congress is a withering shadow. It is a shadow of what it once was. Congress has no power, exerts no power, and we walk and we live in the shadow of a Presidency that is growing larger and larger and larger. The President is not afraid. He says he has his pen and his phone. So he is writing and creating law. One of our philosophers we look to is Montesquieu, and Montesquieu said when the Executive begins to legislate, a form of tyranny will ensue. That is what we have now; we have Executive tyranny. It is not just this President, though. It has been going on for a while, probably for 100 years. We have been allowing more and more power to accumulate in the hands of the Presidency. What we need is a bipartisan taking back of that power. We need Congress to stand up on its own two feet and say: Enough is enough. We are reclaiming the power of the purse, and we are going to do whatever is necessary to get rid of the wasteful spending, the duplicative spending, the offensive spending, and we are going to do what the American people want and that is to spend only what comes in. But I will tell you, I, for one, will oppose this continuing resolution. I recommend that everybody in America call their Congressmen and say: We are tired of the mounting debt. We want you to stand up. We want you to stand up and say enough is enough. Let the funding expire, and make the other side come up with 60 votes to spend the money. It is time we took a stand. I hope we will. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, there comes a time in the history of nations when a civilized people must stand up and decide whether life is important, whether life is something special, and whether there is maybe something greater than just us that has to do with life. It sickens me to see what has been going on with Planned Parenthood. Some of my first memories of my children were the ultrasounds I saw before they were born. We still keep those. We now find out, though, that this technology that can do wonders, that can save babies--now you can perform surgery in the uterus and the baby can survive. These same techniques are being used by Planned Parenthood to manipulate the baby into a position to harvest the baby's organs. I think all America should be sickened by this. It should also trouble us if we are a society that is not sickened by this. I think the time has come to have a full-throated debate. The time has come to end all taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood. Some will say: Well, where will people get their health care? We have 9,000 community health centers and 700 Planned Parenthood clinics. The only difference is abortion. In fact, you can get many things at a community health center you cannot get at Planned Parenthood, but the only thing you get at Planned Parenthood that you cannot get anywhere else is an abortion. But this debate is not just about abortion; this debate is about little babies who have not given their consent. It is about time we had a debate in our country about this, and it is about time we said enough is enough. The question is, Can a civilization long endure that does not respect life? Do we lose everything else that makes us human if we are unwilling to protect life? Can we stand up and defend our other rights if we are not willing to stand up and defend the most basic of rights? I come here today to ask my fellow Senators to vote to defund Planned Parenthood. I hope they will.

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

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Yes. Several Senators addressed the Chair.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that all time be yielded back.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, reserving the right to object, I would be happy to agree to dispensing with the time and having a vote at the soonest possibility, if we were allowed to accommodate amendments for those of us who object to the bill. I think the bill would be made much better with amendments. If we can come to an arrangement to allow amendments to be voted on, I would be happy to allow my consent. But at this point, I object.

Mr. PAUL

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

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for 5 minutes--the 5 minutes that was remaining on the opposition side.

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, let us be very clear about why we are here this evening. We are here this evening because this is an important debate. This is a debate over the Bill of Rights. This is a debate over the Fourth Amendment. This is a debate over your right to be left alone. Justice Brandeis said that the right to be left alone is the most cherished of rights. The right to be left alone is the most prized to civilized men. Let us be clear. We are here tonight because the President continues to conduct an illegal program. The President has been rebuked by the court. In explicit terms, the President has been told that the program he is conducting is illegal. Now, the President opines on television. The President wants to blame--he says: Anybody but me. But you know what. The President started this program without congressional permission. Even the authors of the PATRIOT Act say that the PATRIOT Act in no way gives authority to the President to collect all of your phone records all of the time. If there ever was a general warrant, if there ever was a generalized collection of information from people about whom there is no suspicion, this is it. We are not collecting the information of spies. We are not collecting the information of terrorists. We are collecting all American citizens' records all of the time. This is what we fought the Revolution over. Are we going to so blithely give up our freedom? Are we going to so blithely go along and just say: Take it. Well, I am not going to take it anymore. I do not think the American people are going to take it anymore. Eighty percent of those under 40 say we have gone too far--that this whole collection of all of our records all the time is too much. The court has said: How can records be relevant to an investigation that has not started? The court has said that even under these lower standards, even under these standards of saying that it would be relevant, all of the stuff they are collecting is precisely irrelevant. Now people say: Well, they are not looking at it. They are not listening to it. It is the tip of the iceberg, what we are talking about here. Realize that they were dishonest about the program until we caught them. They kept saying over and over: We are not doing this. We are not collecting your records. They were. The head of the intelligence agency lied to the American people, and he still works there. We should be upset. We should be marching in the streets and saying: He has to go. We cannot allow this. We cannot allow the rule of law to be so trod upon that we live in an arbitrary governmental world where they collect anything they want anytime they want. This is the tip of the iceberg. They are collecting records through Executive order. They are collecting records through section 702. People say: How will we protect ourselves without these programs? What about using the Constitution? What about using judicial warrants? About the Tsarnaev boy, the Boston Bomber, they say: How will we look at his phone records? Get a warrant. Put his name on it. You can get a warrant. There is no reason in the world--the guy had already bombed us. Do you think anybody was going to turn down a warrant? We should have gotten a warrant before. Get warrants on people we have suspicion on. The Simpson guy that was shot in Garland had already been arrested. We had suspicion. Let's hire 1,000 more FBI agents. Let's hire people to do the investigation and quit wasting time on innocent American people. Let's be very clear why we are here: President Obama set up this program, the President Obama who once was against the PATRIOT Act. President Obama once said: You know what; we should have judges write warrants. President Obama, who once believed in the Fourth Amendment, is the President who is now scooping up all of your records illegally. Then he feigns concern and says: Oh, we need to pass this new bill. He could stop it now. Why won't someone ask the President: Why do you continue? Why won't you stop this program now? The President has every ability to do it. We have every ability to keep our Nation safe. I intend to protect the Constitution.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. The people who argue that the world will end and that we will be overrun by jihadists tonight are trying to use fear. They want to take just a little bit of our liberty, but they get it by making us afraid. They want us to fear and give up our liberty. They tell us that if we have nothing to hide, we have nothing to fear. That is a far cry from the standard we were founded upon--innocent until proven guilty. One of the objections I tried to bring forward earlier but was interrupted repeatedly was that the PATRIOT Act was originally intended to go after foreigners and terrorists. We allowed a less-than- constitutional standard. We didn't ask for probable cause; we just said it had to be relevant, the information had to be relevant to an investigation about terrorists. But here is the problem, and this is one of the big problems I have with the PATRIOT Act. We now use parts of the PATRIOT Act to arrest people for domestic crime. Section 213, sneak-and-peek, where the government can come into your house, place listening devices, never announce they were ever in your house, and then leave and monitor your behavior and never let you know they were there, is being used 99.5 percent of the time for domestic crime. So, little by little, we have allowed our freedom to slip away. We allowed the Fourth Amendment to be diminished. We allowed the narrowing loss of something called probable cause. People say: Well, how would we get terrorists with that? The vast majority of warrants are approved in our country--the vast majority of warrants that are Fourth Amendment warrants where we individualized and put a name on it and asked probable cause. If tonight the police are looking for a rapist or a murderer, they will go to the house, and if they suspect the person is inside but nothing is imminently happening, they will stand on the curb and they almost always get a warrant. Do you think there is a judge in this land who would not grant a warrant--particularly after the Boston bombing--to look at the Tsarnaev brothers' records? There is not a judge in the land who would say no. I would venture to say that in advance there is not much chance that a judge would say no if you went to them and said: The Russians have given us indication and evidence that he has been radicalized and has associated overseas with people who are training to attack us. There is no reason why the Constitution can't be used. But we just have to not let those who are in power make us cower in fear. They use fear to take your freedom, and we have to be very, very careful of this. Now, some are saying I am misrepresenting this, that I am saying the government is listening to your phone calls. I am saying they are collecting your phone records. There are programs, though, in which there may be looking at content--emails, for example. The current law says that after 6 months even the content of your email has no protection. We have a very good piece of legislation to try to fix that. But realize that those who are loud, those who are really wanting you to give up your freedom, don't believe the Fourth Amendment protects your records at all. And this is a big debate. We went to the court. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals--the highest court in the land just below the Supreme Court--said that what they are doing is illegal, but we don't yet have a ruling on whether it is constitutional. One of my fears about the bill we are going to pass--the sort of in- between step some think may be better--is that it could moot the case. This means the court case will never get heard by the Supreme Court. I have a court case against the NSA. There is another district court that has ruled against the NSA. We now have an appellate ruling against the NSA. The court may well look at the activity of the Senate and say: Well, you guys have fixed the problem. We don't need to look at it anymore. It is no longer relevant. My other concern about this new bill that is going to pass is that the same people will judge it who judged the previous system. These people are called the rubberstamp courtroom, also known as FISA. Realize that the FISA Court is the court that said the collection of all Americans' records is relevant. The appellate court basically laughed at this notion and said that it sort of destroys any meaning to the word ``relevant'' if you collect everybody's records. It is not even a modifier. Instead of saying ``relevant,'' they should have said ``You can have everyone's records all the time.'' One of my other concerns about the in-between solution we are going to choose is that some are conjecturing--and you have to be suspicious of a government that often lies about their purpose--some are conjecturing that they are going to collect more phone data under the new system. One of the complaints last week, as there was discussion about this--in the newspaper, it was reported that really they were only collecting about 20 to 30 percent of your cell phone data. They were trying to collect all of your land line data, but they weren't for some reason collecting all of your cell phone data. One of my concerns is that as we go to this new system, they may actually be better at collecting our phone records and they may well be able to collect all of our cell phone data. Unless we go to a system where we individualize the warrants, unless we go to a system where a person's name is on the warrant, I am going to be very, very concerned. Now, we will present amendments on this bill. We tried to negotiate to be allowed to present amendments, but there wasn't a lot of negotiating that went on in the last week--in fact, there was none. We will still try. We will put amendments forward, and we will try to get amendments to make the bulk collection less bad when it does occur. One of the things we would like to do is to say that when they search the phone records, they can't put the name of a corporation in there; they would have to put in an individual's name. It is kind of tricky, the way these things are worded. The wording of this bill will say they can only put a U.S. person into the selector term to search all phone records. The problem is that they define ``U.S. person'' as also meaning corporation or association or grouping. So there is a little bit of looseness to the language. So if we are still going to allow corporations, what is to stop them from going back and putting AT&T or Verizon in the selection? Once again they will be looking at all the phone records, and all we will have done is transferred the phone records from government control in Utah to phone company control in another location. Will we be trading bulk collection in Utah for bulk collection under the phone companies? There are good people who believe this bill will reform, and I think they are well-intended. I think they are good people who really think that we will end bulk collection and that it won't happen. My fear, though, is of the people who interpret this work at a place known as the rubberstamp factory over at FISA. It is a secret court, and it is a court in which 99.5 percent of the time they approve warrants. Warrants are simply rubberstamped over there. In fact, they approved that ``relevant'' meant all of your records. So my question is, If they put AT&T as a selector item, will we have the same thing, just in a different location? I have several amendments I am interested in if we are able to amend the bill. One is that the search would have to be an individual. That is more consistent with the Fourth Amendment. Another one would change the standard to the constitutional standard, which would be that there would have to be probable cause, which is a higher standard than simply saying it is relevant. Then we would actually be sending a new signal to the FISA Court. Another amendment I have, which I think would go a long way toward making the PATRIOT Act less bad--I think is the best way to put it-- would be to say that any information gathered under a less-than- constitutional standard could only be used for foreigners and terrorists. See, that was the promise. At the time, there were people who opposed the PATRIOT Act--not enough, but there were a few--and when they opposed the PATRIOT Act, they said their fear was that it would be used against American citizens. They said: No, no, we are only going after terrorists. But the law allows them to do it, and we now have sections of the PATRIOT Act which 99.5 percent of the time are being used for domestic crime. We have also seen that the Drug Enforcement Agency--it is alleged--is using information gathered under the PATRIOT Act to then go back and recreate cases against people for domestic crime. The question we have to ask ourselves is, Are we so frightened that we are willing to give up our freedom? Are we really willing to trade liberty for security? I think the U.S. Court of Appeals had some great points that they made when they ruled against the government, and I think what is important to know is that the President has continued to do this illegally. You have seen him on television. The President has been saying: Well, Congress is just getting in the way. If Congress would just do their job and get rid of this, everything would be OK. But the truth is that Congress never authorized this. Even the authors of the PATRIOT Act said this was not something Congress ever even contemplated. The court is now saying that as well. This was done by the executive branch--admittedly, both a Republican executive branch and a Democratic executive branch--but this wasn't created by Congress. So when the President says ``Well, Congress should just do this,'' the question that has never been asked by anyone in the media is ``Why doesn't he stop it?'' Everybody who has given advice has said he would, and he will come out and say he believes in a balanced solution, but he really is just abdicating the solution and has never discontinued the program, even when he has been told explicitly by the court that the program is an illegal program. This is what the U.S. court of appeals said in the case ACLU v. Clapper: We agree with the appellants that such an expansive concept of ``relevance'' is unprecedented and unwarranted. . . . The records demanded are not those of suspects under investigation, or of people or businesses that have contact with such subjects, or of people or businesses that have contact with others who are in contact with the subjects. So even two steps removed, we are gathering records that are completely irrelevant to the investigation. We are gathering up the phone records of innocent Americans. The other side will say: Well, we are not looking at them. So I have been thinking about this. Our Founders objected to the British soldiers writing warrants. They objected to them coming into their house and grabbing their papers. Do you think our Framers would have been happy if the British Government said: OK, we are just breaking your door down, we are just getting your papers, but we are not going to look at them. Do you think that would have changed the mindset of the Framers? So the fact that they say they are not looking at our records--is that any comfort or should it be any comfort? The act of violation is in taking your records. The act of violation is in allowing the police or a form of the police--the FBI--to write warrants that are not signed by a judge. The court goes on to say: ``The interpretation that the government asks us to adopt defies any limiting principle.'' The idea of a limiting principle when the court looks at things is that, the way I see it, is the difference between something being arbitrary, where there is no sort of principle that confines what would happen--if you have a law that has no limiting principle, it is essentially arbitrary. This is what Hayek wrote about in ``The Road to Serfdom.'' Hayek talked about the difference between the rule of law and having an arbitrary interpretation of the law. The danger of having an arbitrary interpretation of the law and the danger of having general warrants is that they have been used in the past with bias. People have brought their own bias into this. In the sixties, the bias was against civil rights activists and against Vietnam war activists. In the forties, the bias was in incarcerating and interring Japanese Americans. But what was consistent in all of these circumstances was that there was a generalization--a generalization based on the color of your skin, whether you were Asian American or African American, and also about the shade of your ideology. There is a danger in allowing the government to generalize without suspicion and to disobey the Fourth Amendment, and the danger comes that the government could one day generalize and bias could enter into things. We have on our records right now laws that allow an American citizen to be detained. It is not specifically a part of the PATRIOT Act, but it is along the same lines as this, that you are getting rid of the due process amendments and the ability of the Bill of Rights to protect an individual. When we allow an individual to be detained without a trial, what happens is that there is the possibility that someone could decide we don't like ``those'' people. And when you say that could never happen, think about the times in our history when it has. Richard Jewell, everybody said he was the Olympic Bomber. He was convicted on TV. Within hours, people said: Richard Jewell is guilty. Think about if he had been a Black man in 1920 in the South what may have happened to him. Think about the possibility for bias entering into our government. Think about what Madison said about government is--Madison said that we restrain government because we are worried that government may not be comprised of angels. If government were comprised of angels, we would not have to worry about restraining government. Patrick Henry said that the Constitution was about restraining government, not the people. It is not enough for people to say: Oh, I am a good man or I am a good person or the NSA would never do this. The other problem that makes us doubtful is that the NSA has not been honest with us. If they want to develop trust again, the President should have immediately let the person who lied to us go, the Director of National Intelligence. The appeals court concluded by saying that the government's bulk collection of telephone metadata exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized and therefore violates section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. Some will try to argue that this debate was not worth the time we took on it. I could not disagree more. I am like everybody else. You know, I prize my time with my family and being at home on the weekends. I wish we would have done this in a more sensitive way, where we would have had more time and had an open amendment process. But we waited until the end. We waited until the final deadline. This is a characteristic of government. It is a flaw in government, frankly. We lurch from deadline to deadline. People wonder why Congress is so unpopular. It is because we go from deadline to deadline and then it is: Hurry up. We have no time to debate. We just must pass it as is. The biggest debate against amendments is--and it finally convinced people who did not like this. They so much dislike amendments and slowing down the process, they are just going to take it. Even though they don't like it, they are going to pass what the House passed. It is unlikely any amendments will pass. But the thing is, we need to get away from lurching from deadline to deadline. What happens, with budget or spending or any of these bills, is we are presented with thousand-page bills with only hours to go. About a year ago this came up. At that time, we were presented with a 1,000-page bill with 2 hours to go. I read the Senate rules. It said: We are supposed to be presented with the bill for 48 hours in advance. So I raised my hand and made a motion. The motion I made was: Guys, we are breaking the rules here. Men and women, we are breaking the rules here. So they just voted to amend the rules for that bill and ignore the rules. This is why the American people are so frustrated. People here in town think I am making a huge mistake. Some of them, I think, secretly want there to be an attack on the United States so they can blame it on me. One of the people in the media the other day came up to me and said: Oh, when there is a great attack, are you going to feel guilty that you caused this great attack? The people who attack us are responsible for attacks on us. Do we blame the police chief for the attack by the Boston Bombers? The thing is, is that there can be attacks even if we use the Constitution. But there have been attacks while collecting your bulk data. So the ones who say: Well, when an attack occurs, it is going to be all your fault, are any of them willing to accept the blame? We have bulk collection now. Are any of them willing to accept the blame for the Boston bombing, for the recent shooting in Garland? No, but they will be the first to point fingers and say: Oh, yes, it is all your fault. We never should have given up on this great program. I am completely convinced that we can obey the Constitution, use the Fourth Amendment as intended, spirited letter of the law, and catch terrorists. When we look objectively at this program, when they analyzed the classified information, they found that there was no unique data. We had to fight them tooth and nail because they started out saying that 52 cases were cracked by the bulk data program. But then when the President's own bipartisan commission looked at it, it turned out that none of that was true. This gets back to the trust issue. If we are going to be lied to by the Director of National Intelligence, it is hard for us to believe them when they come forward and they say: Oh, this is protecting us. We have to have it. But what we are hearing is information from someone who really did not think it was a big deal to lie to us about whether the program even existed. Mark my words, the battle is not over. There are some--and I talked with one of the, I would say, smarter people in Silicon Valley, somebody who knows this from an intimate level, how things work, and how the codes and programs work. He maintains that the bulk collection of phone data is the tip of the iceberg, that there is more information in other data pools that are classified. Some of this is done through an Executive order called 12333. I am not sure I know everything in it. I have had no briefings on it. So anything I will tell you is from the newspaper alone. But the thing is, is that I would like to know: Are we also collecting your credit card information? Are we collecting your texts? Are we collecting your emails? They have already told us the Fourth Amendment does not protect your emails, even the content, after 6 months. In fact, really they have told you, the Fourth Amendment does not apply to your records at all. So be very careful about the people who say: Trust us. We will never violate your freedom. We will never take advantage of things. The President's Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board's conclusion was that: Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act has shown minimal value in safeguarding the Nation from terrorism. We have not identified any single instance involving a threat to the United States in which the program made a concrete difference in the outcome. The President's privacy board went on to say: The government's collection of a person's entire telephone calling history has a significant and detrimental effect on individual privacy. When they talked about whether the phone records were relevant to an investigation, the President's Commission said this: First, the telephone records acquired under the program have no connection to any specific FBI investigation at the time of their collection. Second, because the records are collected in bulk, potentially encompassing all telephone calling records across the Nation, they cannot be regarded as relevant to any FBI investigation. Here is the continuing danger to us, though: It is, I think, maybe a minor success that we are going to prevent the government from collecting these records. But realize that the interpretation of this will still occur in secret in the FISA Court. This is the FISA Court that said that collecting everyone's records was relevant. It completely destroys the notion that the word ``relevant'' has any meaning at all. This will be the question: Whether we can trust the FISA Court to make an interpretation that is at a higher degree of discernment than the one in which they said ``relevant'' can mean anything. The original USA FREEDOM Act, as passed originally by the House committee, was a better bill. It was gradually watered down until even the Director of National Intelligence, the one who lied about the program, now supports it, which gives me some misgivings. But the records that will be collected--the question is, How will we have an interpretation by the FISA Court? The original bill had an advocate. I thought this was a good part of the original bill. There would be a judicial advocate who would argue on the side of those who were having their records taken. So there would be an adversarial court, lawyers on both sides. Many people who write about jurisprudence and trying to find justice say that one of the essential functions of a court system, in order to find justice, is that there has to be a lawyer on both sides. There has to be an advocate on both sides. The truth is not always easy to find. The truth is presentation of facts by one side, presentation of contrary facts by the other side, and someone has to figure out which facts are more believable or which facts trump other facts. So I think a judicial advocate would have been good. They are still going to have it. They call it by a different name now, but it will be optional at the discretion of the FISA Court. So the court that ruled that all of your records are relevant now will have a choice as to whether to give you an advocate. That does not give me a great deal of comfort. There are other ways we could do this. We occasionally do look at terrorism cases in regular Federal court. When names come up that could jeopardize someone's safety at our intelligence agency or a secret, Federal courts can go into secret session. I have heard the Senator from Oregon often mention this. I think it is a great point that no one wants to reveal the names of anyone or the code or the secrets of how we do this. But if we are talking about constitutional principles, we want to do it in the open. Laws should not be discussed in secret. As we move forward, the PATRIOT Act will expire tonight. It will only be temporary. They will ultimately get their way. But I think the majority of the American people actually do believe the government has gone too far. In Washington, it is the opposite, but I think Washington is out of touch. There will be 80 votes, you know, to say: Continue the PATRIOT Act--maybe more. But if you go into the general public, if you get outside the beltway and visit America, you find it is completely the opposite. There was a poll a couple of weeks ago that said: Over 80 percent of people under age 40--over 80 percent of them--think that the government collecting your phone records is wrong and should not occur. So I think really this will be useful. People say: You are destroying yourself. You should have never done this. The American people will not side with you. People wished me harm and wished that this would be unsuccessful. But you know what, I came here to defend the Bill of Rights and to defend the Constitution, popular or not. But I frankly think that the Bill of Rights and the Constitution are very popular, very important, and I will continue, as long as I have breath and as long as I am here to defend them. I yield back the remainder of my time.

Mr. PAUL. It concerns me that the President, who supports the bulk data collection and has been performing it illegally for 6 years, now supports this bill. The devil is in the details. The question is, Will the new bill still allow bulk collection by the phone companies? Will they be able to put into the search engine not an individual about whom we have suspicion but an entire corporation? This is what was revealed when we saw the warrant that had Tsarnaev's name on it. The Director of National Intelligence came before the American people, came before Congress and swore under oath that they weren't doing this. Part of my problem with the intelligence-gathering in our country is it is hard for me to have trust. It is hard for me to have trust in the people to whom we are giving great power. They also insist we won't be able to catch terrorists. They insist the bulk collection allowed them to catch terrorists. But then it turned out, when it was investigated, when we looked at the classified documents, when the President's bipartisan privacy and civil liberties commission looked at this, when his review board looked at this, and then when the Department of Justice inspector general looked at this, they all found that there was no unique data, there was no great discovery, there was no great breaking up of a terrorist ring. People have brought up the Boston Bomber, the Tsarnaev boy. They say: Well, we need this. We need the PATRIOT Act after the bombing to get his phone records. That is the most absurd thing I have ever heard. He has already committed a bombing. In fact, I think he was dead at that point, and they are saying we couldn't get a warrant to look at his phone records? It is absolutely absurd. I had a meeting with somebody from the intelligence community about 6 months ago, and I asked them this question: How do we get more information about terrorists--with a warrant with their name on it, where we can go as deep into the details as we want, or this metadata collection that uses a less-than-constitutional standard? And he said: Without question, we get more information with a warrant than we do through the metadata. When someone commits an act of atrocity, there is no question we would get a warrant, but I would go even further. I would say that I want to get more warrants on people before they blow up things. I would say that we need more money spent on FBI agents analyzing data and trying to find out whom we have suspicion about so we can investigate their records. I think we spend so much money on people about whom there is no suspicion that we don't have enough time and money left to go after the people who would actually harm us. The people who argue that the world will end at midnight tonight----

Mr. PAUL. My concern is that under the new program, the records will still be sucked up into NSA computers, but the computers will be at the phone company, not in Utah. So the question is, Will it be a distinction without a difference? The question also will be, Will this be individualized? One of the issues about the Fourth Amendment that was the biggest part of the Fourth Amendment for our Founding Fathers was that a warrant should be individualized. General warrants were what we fought the Revolution over. James Otis fought a famous case in the 1760s, and he fought against the British soldiers writing their own warrants. What is interesting is that part of the PATRIOT Act allows our police to write their own warrants. We have something called national security letters. These have been done by the hundreds of thousands. Interestingly, when the President was in the Senate, he was opposed to national security letters and said that they should have judicial warrants. Now, it is interesting that in this bill that will pass, it is supported by the President, supported by the Director of National Intelligence, and now supported in a wide bipartisan fashion. It concerns me whether or not----

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, tonight begins the process of ending bulk collection. The bill will ultimately pass. We always look for silver linings. I think the bill may be replacing one form of bulk collection with another, but the government, after this bill passes, will no longer collect our phone records. My concern is that the phone companies still may do the same thing. Currently, my understanding is the NSA is at the phone company sucking up the phone records and sending them to Utah. My concern is----

Mr. PAUL. Will the Chair inform me when I have 5 minutes remaining?