Rand Paul

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, that is correct. It is a simple question. I think we are not asking for any heavy lifting here. We are asking the President: Do you have the authority. I think it is important that it is a legal question in the sense we want to ask and get a legal, constitutional response. We are not asking--we probably won't do it, we don't intend to do it, or it is not appropriate, or it is not, as a policy matter we don't like doing it. We want the constitutional answer: Do you really believe you have the constitutional authority to do this.

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, I thank the Senator from Wisconsin. Yes, we had two simple requests tonight. The first was for a vote on a nonbinding resolution to express our opinion that it is unconstitutional to kill Americans on American soil. That was denied by the majority party. The second request we have had, in communication with the White House, is for the White House to say or clarify their opinion that they are not going to be doing targeted drone strikes on noncombatants in America. We have not had much success with either one. We will continue to ask that question. I have told them I will remove myself from the blockage of John Brennan's nomination as soon as we get some clarification from the White House. I am still hopeful in the morning that they will do that, and by doing that, we can move forward with it. But I have been more than willing to compromise, because I do not think it is so much about John Brennan as it is about a constitutional principle, that I want the President to publicly acknowledge the fifth amendment does apply to Americans in our country, and that we are not going to cherry-pick when we apply the fifth amendment. At this time, I wish to yield for a question from the Senator from South Carolina.

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, in very quick response to that, one of the few problems with that is they also go on to say that imminent does not need to be immediate. You are also implying that you can kill this American citizen in a noncombat situation, not an active battlefield. I do not accept that standard for the United States. It is another debate whether we accept the standard overseas. I think it is an important debate. But the debate about whether that is a sufficient standard for America, it is not. To kill someone not in combat--one, it is not wise. You are not going to get any information. When someone is eating dinner, why do you not send the police over and arrest them? To kill someone who is in a noncombat situation in America is unacceptable in America under any circumstances. I think we need to come to an agreement on that. I wish to yield for a question to the Senator from Wisconsin.

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, absolutely. My answer to the question the Senator raised is absolutely. We have the right to defend ourselves. It would have been a decision that has to be made imminently because a lethal threat needs to have a lethal response immediately. My whole problem with this whole debate is, none of us disagrees with that, I do not think. We all agree that you can repel an imminent attack. We all agree if someone is outside the Capitol with a rocket launcher or grenade launcher, lethal force can be used against them. None of us disagrees on that. We are talking about a targeted drone program where we target individuals. Overseas, the standard seems to include people who are not actively engaged in combat who we think either might be in the future or have been in the past. I do not think that standard can be used in the United States. I think when you are in a battlefield, you do not get due process. If you are shooting at Americans, drones can hit you anytime, missiles can hit you. There is no due process in a battle. This is a big debate because many have said the battlefield is here. But if the battlefield is here, that would imply the fifth amendment does not apply here. The President has said he will use the fifth amendment in the process of deciding drone attacks overseas, but he does not get the option to kind of use it privately. Using the fifth amendment privately to me is not using the fifth amendment. I will say, I have a great deal of respect for the Senator from Illinois. We have often been on the same side on civil liberties issues. I do not question that he and I may well see eye to eye on this issue, that targeted killings of people in restaurants, in their house, in a hotel, are not something we can or will tolerate. It contravenes the Constitution. It is a simple question. The President should simply answer that question. I think Attorney General Holder was coming in the direction of that. But why is it so hard? Why is it like pulling teeth to get them to admit they do not have this power? Presidents need to more easily say: By golly, no, the Constitution says you cannot do that. The fifth amendment does apply. There are no exceptions to the fifth amendment for American citizens on American soil. That is all we are asking. But I think the 9/11 comparison and Pearl Harbor is a red herring in the sense that none of us disagrees with repelling a lethal attack, an imminent lethal attack, an ongoing lethal attack with lethal force. No one disagrees with that.

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, we have been asking the question of the White House all day, and we have said all along that we would allow the vote to proceed, but we have not gotten any response from the White House. The consideration of whether we will get a response tonight I think is unlikely. We will still keep pressing the issue in the morning as well. But with regard to the Senator's remarks, I think one of the things I hope will come out of this debate will be that we will reassert our authority as a function of the separation of powers, where our body will say to the President: We not only would like your drone memos on how you think you can do this, but we should reassert our authority and tell the President, this is how we think you should do it, and this is the law that is going to dictate and circumscribe how you will do this. That is an authority that I think has been long necessary and we have been letting go by the side and I think we should reassert. At this time, Madam President, I wish to yield to----

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, I wish to yield for a question to the Senator from Pennsylvania.

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, I wish to thank the minority leader for his remarks and for his insightful questions. The question about whether the President has actually gotten involved with what the rules will be has actually been somewhat broached. He was asked at Google about whether this could occur and he said, Well, the rules would have to be different outside than inside. So it implies they have thought about what the rules should be outside, but to my knowledge no one in the Intelligence Committee has been informed what the rules are inside. It troubles me that they think they have the authority to do targeted drone strikes inside, particularly when there are examples of the Twin Towers and 1941 Pearl Harbor. Those would be attacks we would repulse no matter who we knew was coming in. There wouldn't be a targeted strike on an individual at a designated time. We would repulse those attacks militarily and they wouldn't even fall into the category of what we are talking about here as targeted drone strikes. We might use drones, but they wouldn't be what we are talking about. These are questions we have been asking all day. So they have answered a question, just not the question we asked.

Mr. PAUL. Yes.

Mr. PAUL. Yes.

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, I thank the Senator from South Dakota for his remarks and would make the comment that I, as has he, have seen what drones can do to protect our soldiers and no one is arguing against that. No one is arguing against drones or any other kinds of force to defend the country against any kind of an attack. What we are arguing for is that noncombatants--people not engaged in combat in our country--are due fifth amendment protections, and that the White House should acknowledge this. This is important because the drone strikes overseas, when looking at the category and looking at the way they are being done and under what standards, there are some of those standards that we don't think are appropriate for U.S. citizens on U.S. soil. So we are asking for a clarification. We think Attorney General Holder got close to that today, under the duress of cross-examination. We wish to see him do it voluntarily in a nice, concise statement and we would be happy to vote on the Brennan nomination as early as tomorrow morning. I wish to yield time to the minority leader.

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, that is exactly the sequence of things. We have been in contact with the White House throughout the night. We have made several phone calls to the White House. We told them we are willing to allow a vote on the Brennan nomination. All we ask in return is that we get a clear implication of whether they believe they have the authority under the Constitution to target Americans on American soil. I think it is a question that is fair to ask, and we have been willing to let them have the vote at any time either earlier tonight, obviously, as well as in the morning. All we ask in return from the White House is a clarification. The last report I got from the White House is that they were done talking tonight. I hope that doesn't mean they are done talking tomorrow. I think this struggle is an important struggle, and I think there needs to be clarification from the White House before this goes forward. This is a point in time when the question has been raised. I think it is important for them to answer the question, and the fifth amendment is not optional. They don't get to choose to adhere to the fifth amendment. This applies to U.S. citizens on U.S. soil, and there are no exceptions to that. Without yielding time, I would like to entertain a question from the Senator from South Dakota.

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Texas for his remarks. I think he has hit it exactly on the head. The question is a very pertinent question. The question is really where do we go from here. I see this as a struggle. I see that we are engaged in an epic struggle, but it is not a struggle between Republicans and Democrats; it is a struggle between the President and the Constitution. The question is, Does the President have the power and the prerogative to have his way regardless of the Constitution? The question is, Does the Attorney General get to say that he will adhere to the fifth amendment when he chooses to? Is there a choice for American citizens on American soil that they either get the fifth amendment protections or they don't get the fifth amendment protections? This really is a struggle not only between the President and the Constitution but between the Senate and the Congress and the President, to say whether the President gets to determine this policy or whether this is a policy that should come from Congress. I think we should be asking not just for the President to give his memos on drones, we should be giving him our memos on drones. We need to be dictating the law to the President and not acquiescing and giving the President this authority. This should be a battle between the executive and the legislative. It should involve Republicans and Democrats trying to restrain the President from saying that he has the ability to decide when you get fifth amendment protections and when you do not. At this time, I, without yielding the floor, would like to entertain a question from the Senator from Florida.

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Texas for coming to the floor. I am overwhelmed with all the responses. What I would say is that I think there are things that are more important than personalities, more important than party, and they are the things our country was founded upon. These are the things that bring people together who want us to stand and say these protections will exist. The interesting thing about our Constitution is it protects people who are--those who are defenseless often, those who can be falsely accused of crimes is what the Constitution is there for. I think there are people from all walks of life who say my brother was falsely accused or my brother was put in jail for 5 years or something, either they did not do it or it was an inappropriate sentence. I think people understand the idea of wanting to be protected from false accusation, not only for something where you might be put in prison but for something, in this case, you might be killed for. We all understand. All you have to do is get online to read comments to any kind of story online to know people make all kinds of wild accusations and wild comments online. Do we want to have that be one of the indications for whether you might be targeted for surveillance or whether you might be targeted for a drone strike, that anything such as this could happen without you having your due process, that the fifth amendment somehow would be optional, that the executive branch would decide when they are going to apply the fifth amendment. I am overwhelmed with the responses. I think it is something that unifies people. It has brought together both people from the Democratic side of the aisle as well as the Republican side of the aisle because, to me, this is not about whether the President is a Republican or Democrat. I have supported several of his nominees. I have supported people because I think he has the right to make political nominations, even though I do not agree with much of any of the nominees or the politics of the administration. This is different. There is a constitutional principle. We are here today to filibuster against or for a constitutional principle not necessarily an individual. But it is something I think a lot of Americans believe strongly in. I thank Senator Cruz very much for the comments I have gotten from the Senator and I would entertain any other questions.

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, we have sent three different letters over the last month and a half or so, and we really have not gotten a detailed response to any of the letters. We finally had one question answered from John Brennan, and that question was answered by him by saying the CIA does not operate within the United States, which is a reassertion of the law, which we at least appreciated. But they have not responded by saying they will follow the law. We have not gotten an adequate answer yet, although we are getting closer to it. Maybe the Senator from Texas can give us a little more insight into this in the sense that the question now really is not just Brennan. Brennan has answered that the CIA cannot operate in the United States. But there is a question: Can the military operate in the United States? And this question was asked, I think very poignantly, by the Senator from Texas today, trying to get an answer from the Attorney General on this question: Can you kill Americans on American soil who are not involved in combat? The answer has been evasive because he has brought up basically a red herring: Pearl Harbor or the Twin Towers, which none of us are disputing that the military can respond to a lethal attack with lethal force. So what I would like to do without relinquishing the floor is see if the Senator from Texas would like to respond as to his interpretation of what he was hearing from Attorney General Holder and whether the comments he was hearing--if Attorney General Holder were willing to sort of try to complete that conversation in a letter to us--whether actually we might get close to actually being on the same page.

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, we sent our last letter to John Brennan, I believe, in the latter part of January. We got no response. We then sent him a second letter in the first or second week of February and got no response. We then sent our third letter, which I believe is the letter the Senator was reading from, and that was a couple of weeks ago. We got no response to any of these letters. However, when the committee--both Republicans and Democrats--was holding up his nomination last week and the chairman of the committee asked for a response, all of a sudden we got a response. The response from Brennan was actually encouraging. The response, I believe, was this morning or yesterday. The day has kind of run together. That response was basically that the CIA doesn't have the authority to operate in the United States and that is the rule. It has been the law since the 1947 National Security Act. Our concern is that the Attorney General's response has been a little more vague. Basically they have not done any killings in the United States yet. They don't have any intention to, but they might. The problem with the ``they might'' part is they left it kind of vague. They said it would have to be extraordinary, but they point out two occurrences in which they would not have targeted drone strikes. They point out Pearl Harbor and 9/11. In both of those instances, I think it is appropriate to respond militarily, but they would not have targeted drone strikes. They might use drones, but they would not have targeted drone strikes because they would be responding immediately to someone attacking us. I think we all agree that we can respond to lethal force at any point in time. I think the problem is the drone program around the world often targets people who are not in combat. It is hard for me to imagine that we would have people who--I don't know if they are conspiring or what they are doing--are talking to an individual or someone in a restaurant or cafe, that we wouldn't arrest them. The ranking member on the Intelligence Committee made a good point. He said: Particularly if they are in a noncombat area in the United States, wouldn't you want to arrest them to get some information from them to see if they might be a threat? One reason would be to see if they are innocent or guilty. If they are truly guilty, you would probably be able to get some information from them by interrogating them. The Senator asked the question about the limitations. That is ultimately what we are asking Brennan, Eric Holder, the Attorney General, and the President. What limitations do you cede to your authority? The President takes an oath that he is going to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. He says he will do that, but the oath doesn't say: I intend to do that. It says: I will preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. The problem we have is that when John Brennan has been asked what are the limitations to your authority, his response has been that we have no geographic limitations. He says he gets that from the use of authorization of force to go to war in Afghanistan. The problem with that is I don't think people who voted for that intended that there would be no limitations and that we could have war anywhere. Then the question is: Is there a limitation at the U.S. border? Well, there is a law--a posse comitatus law--from after the Civil War which says the military doesn't operate here. It is not because we think the military are bad people, we just have different rules for the military. Our soldiers are not used to dealing with due process, and we don't make them. On a battlefield when they are shooting, they don't give people their Miranda rights. They don't get to have a jury trial. There is none of that going on on the battlefield so soldiers don't have to deal with that, but policemen in our country have different rules of engagement. They are required to deal with that, and we want that because we want there to be a process because we have always been concerned in our country--we broke away from the mother country in England because we were concerned about too much power. We wanted that power to be reined in. So our biggest problem is that when they say they have no geographic limitations, that could include America. So that was our next question. Senator Wyden asked Brennan in the committee: Do you have the authority to do strikes in America? John Brennan's answer was--this was the first answer before we got the second answer: Well, we want to optimize transparency and we want to optimize secrecy, and that was his conclusion. It was like, what does that mean? So that is when we got more and more involved with asking this question and asking it repeatedly. But I think there are limitations. Ultimately, there is a limitation of the Constitution, but also there is a big debate that needs to go on about what are the limitations of what we voted on when we went to war. I was all in favor of doing everything possible to those who attacked us on 9/11, of going to Afghanistan. We need to figure out how and what the completion of that mission is, and whether that use or authorization of force is open-ended, forever, or whether we are ever going to vote on that again, which I think means when we vote on that again, we retain that power to bring it back to the Senate, to the Congress. It doesn't mean we would not do it again, but we should have that debate and a vote again if we are going to have another war. At this time I would be happy to entertain another question from the Senator from Wyoming.

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, one of the things I hear at home, similar to what the Senator from Wyoming is talking about, is that we hear people worried about the erosion of their rights. They worry about statements from the President when the President says he intends to protect the Constitution--except for maybe when it is infeasible or when it is inconvenient. I think that worries people. One of the other things about drones, which is not particularly related to this, necessarily, but I know in Wyoming I bet they have the same concerns, is our farmers are not too happy about the government flying drones over their property. That is something on which we had an interesting vote last year. We had a vote on whether the EPA could continue these without explaining to us. Once again, it was sort of similar to this fight in the sense that we wanted to stop the drone flights over farms. It was a pretty simple request, an easy request until we got the government to explain what kind of criteria, what kind of rules they were using for flying over farms. We got 56 Senators to vote to ban these drone flights until we got more information. But it is like a lot of other things in the Senate, it took 60 votes, so we didn't actually quite win even though we had a majority. With regard to what we are trying to accomplish through this, the main thing we want is a public acknowledgment from the President or from the Attorney General, saying that their policy is not to kill noncombatants in America. Many of the drone strikes overseas have been noncombatants--at least at the time they are killed they were not involved in combat. I don't think it is too much to ask the President to clarify that what he means is the United States can repel invasion, the United States can repel attacks, whether they are American citizens or not. We don't have a dispute with that. Our concern is when you look at the drone program overseas, a lot of people are sitting around eating, walking, sleeping in their house--that that is not the sort of a program I can imagine using in the United States. I cannot imagine we are going to have drone strikes on people while they are asleep in their home or when they are out eating in a cafe or eating in a restaurant. I cannot imagine that is the standard we are going to use. Maybe it is just a misunderstanding. Maybe the President can clear this up. When Attorney General Holder was there this morning, the Senator from Texas asked him this question and under pointed questioning it seemed as if he was backing toward an answer that might be acceptable. He said it was not appropriate, but what we are looking for from the lead legal officer of the President, from the President, is something a little more precise than ``I don't intend to,'' or a little more precise than ``it is not appropriate.'' We would like him to say that they don't have a legal authority to kill Americans on American soil. We just don't believe they do. Targeted drone strikes in America, I don't think they have the legal authority nor the constitutional prerogative to do this, and they need to admit to that. It has been like pulling teeth trying to get information or get them to acknowledge anything. Our goal is to try to get the President to acknowledge something publicly, more so than any kind of legislation. We do have some legislation that we are interested in. We are not demanding that it pass in order to let this nomination go forward. What we are asking for is we will let them have a vote any time they want if they will at least give us a little more of a clear understanding that they are going to obey the law. It took a month and a half for us to get the response from them that the CIA doesn't operate in the United States; that just is the law. It has been the law since 1947. One would not think it would be that hard to get them to acknowledge they are going to obey the law. The posse comitatus law has been here since the 1860s, and it says the military doesn't operate in the United States. How hard is it for the administration to say we are going to adhere to the posse comitatus law and that we are not going to use the military in the United States? That clarifies quite a few things because if they think they are going to kill Americans with the FBI, at least we already know the FBI works under the rules of the Constitution. I would think at that point we are getting somewhere or at least moving in the right direction. We are not looking for something where we permanently stop the President from getting his political appointees. I have mentioned previously I voted for three of the President's political appointees. My point in being here doesn't have so much to do with the CIA Director as it has to do with the policy of the administration on drones. He just happens to have been in charge of that policy on drones and the CIA has something to do with drones overseas. At least Brennan has been forthright and finally came forward with a letter that says the CIA doesn't operate in the United States. Unfortunately, Attorney General Holder's response has been somewhat muddled in the sense that he kind of says we have not yet, we don't intend to, but we might. Now he says there is an extraordinary circumstance, but his extraordinary circumstance doesn't quite make any sense because it is 9/11 or Pearl Harbor. Well, in both of those instances we would react immediately to stop somebody, but they would not be targeted drone strikes. I cannot imagine that we would know the person's name and who they are when they are flying a plane into a building. We would respond to them, but it would not have anything to do with the targeted drone strikes. It is sort of answering a question that wasn't asked. At this time, Madam President, and without yielding the time, I wish to entertain a question from the Senator from Wyoming.

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, I thank the Senator from Wyoming for coming to the floor and helping to advance this debate. One of the points that was made toward the end is about our soldiers he visited and that he saw the capacity of the drones. The one thing that should not be lost here is that we are not arguing about the use of drones, particularly in defense of our military. When people are shooting at our soldiers I want the best equipment in the world that we have to defend them and to win our battles. That is something I think we should all want. But I think our American soldiers would be disappointed in us here at home if they felt, which I think many of them do, that they are fighting for our Bill of Rights, they are fighting for our Constitution, they are fighting for our conception of freedom--in doing so, I think they would be disappointed if they felt the drones that were being used against the enemy in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan were going to be used against Americans in America without any kind of due process, because the whole idea of the Constitution is what they are fighting for. That is what the President has pledged to uphold and preserve. So it is such an important battle. The unanimous consent that we put forward, which we had hoped they would let us vote on in the morning also but they have disagreed with, basically says the use of drones to execute or target American citizens on American soil who pose no imminent threat clearly violates the constitutional due process rights of citizens. The point we are trying to get at, which I think for the administration ought to be an easy question--we are not talking about someone attacking the Twin Towers. We are in agreement that the military can repulse attacks by American citizens in planes. Some of the hijackers--I think some of them--I don't know if any of them were citizens or not but--yes, some of them were citizens, I think. The point is, no matter who you are, if you attack the United States you can be repelled and that lethal force can be used. The point is we are concerned that some of the drone strikes overseas are of people not involved in combat at the time, and that is another question, but here at home I don't think we want to have a standard where someone who we think might be a terrorist, who we think might be engaged in something, who is in a restaurant eating dinner, would be killed. I think we want more protections for Americans. We want, if you are accused of a crime, to have the ability to defend yourself in a court of law. I, without relinquishing the floor, would be happy to entertain any other questions.

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I would like to thank the Senator from Utah for his expert constitutional analysis, and I rely on his advice and analysis of legislation and want to thank him very much for being part of this debate. We are in contact with the White House, and we have told the White House we will allow debate on Brennan as soon as they will give a clarification of what their opinion is on drone strikes in America. I think after Holder's cross-examination, his opinion may not be too far off from what we are asking for. But we want it clarified and in writing because we think this is an important battle for the American public and an important battle for the Constitution. So if the President or the Attorney General will promise to give us something, even give us something by morning, we are more than willing to go ahead with the vote in the morning with that information. At this time, without yielding the floor, I wish to entertain a question from the Senator from Wyoming.

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Texas for coming to the floor and cheering me up. I was getting kind of tired. I appreciate him bringing news from the outside world. As you know, we are not allowed to have electronics on the floor, so I don't really have much knowledge of the electronic outside world. But actually it is probably a good thing for every American eventually not to see their phone or their computer for about 8 hours. The thing is, people think that we should not--people are always saying don't fight, get along, and stuff. I think people do want that. I think at the same time they want you to stand up and stand for something and believe in something. It doesn't have to mean that we do it in an acrimonious way. Even the Senator from Illinois and I usually have civilized words together. There is a smile. The thing about it is that there are principles we ought to stand for. I think the most important principle here, though, is that really this is a tug-of-war between the executive branch and the legislative branch. There may be some partisanship, that we can't all get together in the Senate to say to the President that we think his power should be restrained, but I think at the same time there are some on the other side who are saying that. Really, that is what this should be about. It is about how much power a President can have. Can a President have the power to decide to kill Americans on American soil? But not only that, can the President have the power to decide when the Bill of Rights applies? Can you be targeted because you have been alleged to have committed some crime and your Bill of Rights is stripped away even if you are here in the United States? I think it is a pretty easy question. Maybe someone from the media would ask the President tonight--I don't know if he is still up or not--but ask the President the question. Ask him, do you plan on killing Americans who are not in combat? Do you plan on killing Americans who are not in a combat position, people whom you might be accusing of some kind of crime but who are actually not engaged in combat? I would think it would be a simple answer. In fact, I am willing to go home if we can get an answer from the President that says: People not engaged in combat won't be on any target list. It is a pretty simple question to ask and a pretty reasonable question to ask. After much jockeying and debate with the Senator from Texas asking the Attorney General this question, we finally did get to where it seems as though he was coming toward not trying to but being forced to say it is not constitutional to kill noncombatants. It should be an easy question. So we will take a telegram. We will even take a tweet. If the Attorney General would tweet us, we can have that relayed to the floor and let him know--let us know that basically they acknowledge that their power is not unlimited. I don't think this is really an overstatement of the cause. This has been written up. Glenn Greenwald has written this up. Conor Friedersdorf has written this up, talking about if you have a war that has no end, if you have a war that has no geographic limit, and then if you have strikes that have no constitutional bounds, basically what you have is an unlimited imperial Presidency. This is not a partisan issue. A lot of this began under George Bush. It has been continued, expanded, doubled, and quintupled and made 10 times worse by the current President. But even under George Bush, nobody ever maintained they could kill Americans at home. I can't imagine that the President, when he comes forward and says he has not killed Americans and he does not intend to do it but he might--that somehow we are supposed to be placated by that. Somehow that is supposed to be enough. This is not the first time we have seen this--not the first time we have seen a reversal of fortunes here, reversal of what I think he stood for as a candidate. I have said many times, probably 10 times today that I admired the President. I admired the President when he was a Senator on many issues. I admired the President when he ran for office. But the President who ran for office and said we are not going to tap phones without a warrant, the President who ran for office and said we are not going to torture people now says we are going to kill people with no due process? I find that incredibly hypocritical and incredibly ironic. I see no reason why he can't come forward and say: We don't get to pick and choose when the fifth amendment applies. We don't get to pick and choose when people can be accused of crime and get no adjudication and be killed by a drone. I just cannot imagine he can't answer these questions. It is not enough to say: I don't intend to do so. Last year when we passed the national defense authorization bill, there was included in that the ability to indefinitely detain an individual, an American citizen. In fact, I asked another Senator on my side--I said: Does that mean you can send an American to Guantanamo Bay? He said: Yes, if they are dangerous. That would be fine if we all agreed who is dangerous and who committed a crime, but that would be an accusation, and that would have to be adjudicated somehow, and if you don't get a trial, how do we determine your innocence or guilt or whether you are going to be sent to Guantanamo Bay? The President, like so many times, said: I don't support indefinite detention. I would veto that. No, no, I won't veto that this time, but I would veto that if I were still Candidate Barack Obama. But I am President Barack Obama, I am not going to veto that. So instead he says: I have no intention of detaining anyone. Here is the problem. It is not good enough. The law is for everybody. It is not for saying: Oh, I am a good President. I am very--I went to Harvard. I am not going to detain anybody. That is not enough. The law is what the law is. If the law allows you to be detained as an American citizen, what about the next guy who is not so high-minded, the next guy who decides he is going to detain political opponents and ethnic groups or people he dislikes? What happens when that happens? It is not enough to say: I don't intend to do something. I would think the leader of the free world, the leader of I think one of the most important nations if not the most important nation or civilization we have had in historic times--I have high hopes and high estimation of who we are as a people. It is not enough for him to say: I don't intend to break the Constitution. You either believe in the Constitution or you do not. I think illustrative of sort of this opinion was when I interviewed or asked questions to Senator Kerry when he was being nominated. I asked him these questions about, can you go to war without a declaration of war. His answer was, oh, of course I will support the Constitution, except for when I won't support the Constitution, when it is inconvenient. It is sometimes hard to go to war, it is messy, there is all this voting stuff, and people don't want to vote to go to war, they don't want to raise taxes. It is just hard to get the votes for war. So when it is inconvenient, I will not. That is the problem. He asked me or sort of insinuated that I was an absolutist. I don't know how to halfway believe that Congress should declare war. I don't know how to halfway believe in the fifth amendment. This is not one we are even debating exactly what it means, what the establishment clause of the first amendment means. There is really not a lot of debate over what due process is. When you are accused of a crime, when you are accused of something, you are indicted. When you are accused, you get a trial, you get due process. Nobody is really debating what that means. Yet the Attorney General for this President has said that the fifth amendment will be applied when they can. To be fair, I think he is referring to foreign strikes. He is talking about foreign strikes. To tell you the truth, it is kind of muddled, whether the Constitution applies to people in foreign lands or in foreign zones. But that is the whole point of this. The point is that this is America. We are not talking about a battlefield. We are not talking about people using legal force. If you are in America, if you are outside the Capitol and you have a grenade launcher, you will be killed without due process. You don't get due process. You don't get an attorney. You don't get Miranda rights. Nobody thinks that you do. But if you are sitting in a cafe, and somebody thinks you e-mailed your cousin in the Middle East, and they think you are conspiring with them, you should be charged. You should be imprisoned if they can make the charges stick. But they should not just drop a Hellfire missile on your cafe experience. We have to realize and the President above all people--someone who taught constitutional law should realize that his opinion is not so important. Even as the President, it is not so important. For him to say that he doesn't intend to kill people--I would defy a constitutional lawyer in our country to say that is important. The law is what it is, and he is going to give us a legal interpretation of the law and not what his intent is. To say he hasn't killed anybody yet, to say he has no intention of killing anybody but he might, is just not a legal standard I chose to live by. It concerns me. It concerns me that we have documents in the United States that are produced by the government that indicate people who might be a terrorist. The Bureau of Justice came out with one last year, and it said people who are missing fingers, people who have colored stains on their clothes, people who have more than 7 days of food might be terrorists. Ironically, another government Web site says that if you live on the coast, you should have 7 days of food because there might be a hurricane, you might need to have the food. But another Web site says that if you do, you might be crazy and a lunatic and a survivalist, and you might be someone we might need to target with a drone. If you see somebody hiding this, you are supposed to report them. If you hear of people who have guns in their house or lots of weatherized ammunition or ready-to-eat meals, they could be on the target list. Of that is whom we are targeting to be terrorists, I would certainly want a trial. I just wouldn't think it would be enough to be accused. People say: Oh, well, they are just members of al-Qaida, but they don't have a membership card. I don't know that we have looked at anybody's because they are dead; they were blown up with a missile, so no one is looking at their al-Qaida membership card. The thing is in the United States they might say someone is associated with al-Qaida or associated with terrorism. We have had experience with government offices and officials talking about people who might be terrorists. The Fusion Centers in Missouri said people who are pro-life might be terrorists. They said people who are for secure borders might be terrorists. They said the people who vote for the Constitution Party or the Libertarian Party might be terrorists. So if they believe in signature strikes, I guess if we see the traffic going to the Libertarian Party Convention, that could probably hit a caravan and hit a whole bunch of them at once. People say that is absurd. The President is not advocating that. He is advocating a drone strike in America, and all we have to compare it with is the drone strike overseas. He doesn't want to talk about it, but when forced to, he says the rules will probably be slightly different inside the United States than they will be outside the United States. I guess he does believe he has a right to have a drone strike program in the United States. He will just have slightly different rules. I have an important question for him. He needs to give me a call. Is one of the rules of inside the U.S. drone strike program to obey the Constitution that a person will get a trial by a jury of their peers? Is that going to be in the rules for inside America as opposed to outside America? It is disturbing that it has been so hard to get any information on this. I wouldn't have gotten any information at all--I don't think--had we not gotten some support from the other side. The Senator from Oregon stood in the committee. In fact, he asked the question before I did. I was fascinated he asked the question. Senator Wyden stood in the Intelligence Committee and asked: Can you do a drone strike on Americans on American soil? John Brennan's response--I kid you not--we need to optimize transparency and we need to optimize secrecy. That was his answer. Here is the followup question: What does that mean? Does that mean you can kill Americans on American soil? What are you trying to say or what are you trying not to say? To Brennan's credit, he finally answered the question only when there was a threat of him not getting out of committee--thanks to the bipartisan support of Republicans and Democrats threatening to hold him up. He finally got out, but on the day we threatened to hold him up, he finally responded. I sent him questions a month and a half previously, and I finally got an answer after the threat of his nomination not coming out of committee. This is not the way it should work. The President is bragging about how transparent the guy is, that he believes in transparency, that he is such a high-minded fellow, but he won't give any answer unless someone forces him to. The same thing with the President. So we finally get an answer and John Brennan says: Well, the CIA cannot kill people in the United States, it is against the law. Yes, we knew that. Thanks. Thanks for admitting you are going to obey the law. We feel blessed that you said you will now obey the law. But it is sad that it took a month and a half--and under severe duress--that they have admitted they will obey the law and the CIA will not kill you in America. The problem is it is kind of a tricky answer because they are not the ones running the drone program. The Defense Department runs the program. You can be sure the CIA is not going to kill you, but the Defense Department might. Still the answer is: We haven't killed anybody yet. We don't intend to, but we might. So that is what we are going to have to be satisfied with. So we got the answer from the Attorney General, and his was a little more detailed and actually had some good things in it. Basically, he concluded by saying they could conceive of a place where someone could get attacked or where the United States might attack Americans, but the examples they came up with were not what we were asking about. So it is sort of akin to answering a question but answering the question that wasn't asked. They said: Well, if planes are flying at the Twin Towers and if Pearl Harbor is happening again, obviously, we could see a use for drone strikes. Well, me too. I mean, if we are being attacked and there is a war or even if there is a person with a grenade launcher, we have the ability to respond to that. No one is questioning that. The reason this question comes up is that a significant portion of the drone strikes overseas are occurring on people who are not involved in combat. Now there are allegations that there are bad people and they may have been in combat but are not currently in combat. The question is: Are we going to use the foreign drone strike model in the United States? Are we going to kill noncombatants in the United States? Are we going to kill people whom we suspect? That sort of gets us to the other question when we talk about what rules and procedures we expect in our country. Do we expect that the police would come and arrest you and put you in jail for the rest of your life because they suspect something? Is suspicion enough? Obviously not. We believe that is the beginning of it. Usually, it involves probable cause and involves a judge to get information. I have a message here--not from the White House. It is a message saying the White House hasn't returned our phone calls. If anybody knows anybody at the White House and wants to come, we are looking for an answer from the White House. We have called Justice also. I think the answer says something about the sequester. Maybe they are going to call me when the sequester is over. I think one of the courtesies they ought to think about is-- particularly if what they are hearing is something that they don't object to--why not end the debate by going ahead and letting us know? Why not go ahead and let us know they agree they are not going to be killing noncombatants. I would think that would be a pretty easy answer for them. In negotiating with any kind of executive branch--this one or others--that when we get a nonanswer or a nonresponsive answer or get a refusal to answer, I think that is when we need to be concerned that the answer is not the answer they want to be public. It is an answer that perhaps the fifth amendment will be optional depending on who is judging the circumstances. As we look forward and look at some of the information that has been gathered over time on this, one of the interesting articles we have collected on this was an article in the Los Angeles Times entitled ``Police employ Predator drone spy planes on the home front.'' This is an article by Brian Bennett. Reporting from Washington--Armed with a search warrant, Nelson County Sheriff Kelly Janke went looking for six missing cows on the Brossart family farm in the early evening of June 23. Three men brandishing rifles chased him off, he said. Janke knew the gunman could be anywhere on the 3,000-acre spread in eastern North Dakota. Fearful of an armed standoff, he called in reinforcements from the state Highway Patrol, a regional SWAT team, a bomb squad, ambulances and deputy sheriffs from three other counties. He also called in a Predator B drone. As the unmanned aircraft circled 2 miles overhead the next morning, sophisticated sensors under the nose helped pinpoint the three suspects and showed they were unarmed. Police rushed in and made the first known arrests of U.S. citizens with help from a Predator, the spy drone that has helped revolutionize modern warfare. But that was just the start. Local police say they have used two unarmed Predators based at Grand Forks Air Force Base to fly at least two dozen surveillance flights since June. The FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration have used Predators for other domestic investigations, officials said. ``We don't use [drones] on every call out,'' said Bill Macki, head of the police SWAT team in Grand Forks. ``If we have something in town like an apartment complex, we don't call them.'' The drones belong to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which operates eight Predators on the country's northern and southwestern borders to search for illegal immigrants and smugglers. The previously unreported use of its drones to assist local, state, and federal law enforcement has occurred without any public acknowledgement or debate. Congress first authorized Customs and Border Protection to buy unarmed Predators in 2005. Officials in charge of the fleet cite broad authority to work with police from budget requests to Congress that cite ``interior law enforcement support'' as part of their mission. In an interview, Michael C. Kostelnik, a retired Air Force general who heads the office that supervises drones, said Predators are flown ``in many areas around the country, not only for federal operators, but also for state and local law enforcement. . . .'' But former Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), who sat on the House homeland security intelligence subcommittee at the time and served as its chairwoman from 2007 until this year, said no one discussed using Predators to help local police serve warrants or do other basic work. Using Predators for routine law enforcement without public debate or clear legal authority is a mistake, Harman said. ``There is no question that this could become something that people will regret,'' said Harman, who resigned from the House in February and now heads the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a Washington think tank. The point is it isn't so much about technology. I am not opposed to drones being used even domestically. It is about the individual freedom, it is about the process, and it is about how they are used. For example, just like in national defense, if someone is robbing a liquor store and it is safer to get the robber down with a drone, that is fine. If someone is armed and robbing and threatening people in the liquor store and people as they come out, I don't mind if that person was shot with a drone or a rifle from a policeman. It is what it is. As one of my friends who is a physician would say when people would come in wounded from robbing someone: Well, I guess that is an occupational hazard if you break into homes. The thing is it isn't the force we are talking about, it is whether the process is right. So they can use lethal force when lethal force is threatened. The question about drones is whether they are being used with warrants, if they are spying on someone or doing surveillance on someone. One of the bills we introduced last year was a bill to require warrants for drone surveillance. This is a hot topic, and I think it will probably get up to the Supreme Court. I don't believe it has yet. There were cases that were talking about GPS tagging of cars, and the Supreme Court ruled they cannot do that without a warrant. My suspicion is they will rule in favor of warrants on drones too. Although there is some dispute over what they call open spaces. I think that with open spaces we need to be concerned that just because you are not inside your house does not mean you don't still deserve some privacy on your own land. So it is not so much that the drone is necessarily our enemy, but it just allows the government to do so much more. We need to be very careful about the safeguards of the Constitution and requiring whether these safeguards are met as far as protecting our liberty. This is from the same article from the Los Angeles Times: In 2008 and 2010, Harman helped beat back efforts by Homeland Security officials to use imagery from military satellites to help domestic investigations. Congress blocked the proposal on grounds it would violate the Posse Comitatus Act. The Posse Comitatus Act is pretty important and it has been part of our discussion today and we are not the first person to raise this. The military is not authorized to operate in the United States. Some may say: Why not? The reason is they operate under different rules of engagement than our police do. In Afghanistan, Iraq or in any kind of war theater, they have warrants, they don't have Miranda rights, and they don't get due process in war. At home we do. That is why it is important we get folks to acknowledge this is not a battlefield. America is not a battlefield. It is a place where we have constitutional rights and have for hundreds of years. The Posse Comitatus Act--after the Civil War--regulated and prohibited the military from acting as a police or taking a police role on U.S. soil. Proponents say the high resolution cameras, heat sensors, and sophisticated radar on the Border Protection drones--and this is the other point--were legislated to be used on the border. One could argue that there is a Federal role for monitoring borders for national defense and other reasons, but now they are loaning them out to local law enforcement and law enforcement is also buying drones directly. So they have high-resolution cameras, heat sensors, and sophisticated radar on the Border Protection drones that can help track criminal activity in the United States just as the CIA uses predators and other drones to spy on militants in Pakistan, nuclear sites in Iran, and other targets around the globe. For decades, U.S. ports have allowed law enforcement to conduct aerial surveillance without a warrant. This is part of that sort of open spaces doctrine. I am not saying it makes it right but that the government has been doing it for decades. Some of the courts apparently have ruled that what a person does in the open--even behind a backyard fence--can be seen by a passing airplane and is not protected by privacy laws. I don't think I agree with that. If a person is swimming in their pool in their backyard or in the hot tub, just because we have the technology to be able to see them in their hot tub, does that mean they have a right to look at what people are doing in their backyard? I don't accept that. I think it has been abused and we should be fighting against this surveillance state. Advocates say Predators are simply more effective than other planes. Flying out of earshot and out of sight, a Predator B can watch a target for 20 hours nonstop, far longer than any police helicopter or manned aircraft. What I would say there is it seems as though that might be somewhat analogous to the GPS case. The Supreme Court ruled that you can't tag people's cars and watch them constantly, waiting to see if they break any laws. So I would think the same for a Predator, that you stake them out, watch, and you will eventually get somebody breaking the speed limit or running a stop sign. I don't think that is what was intended. Howard Safir says, ``I am for the use of drones.'' He is the former head of operations of the U.S. Marshals Service and former New York City police commissioner. He said, ``Drones could help police in manhunts, hostage situations and other difficult cases.'' I agree completely. If someone is being held in harm's way, if someone is being held and threatened, drones are a great idea. So it is not that I am opposed to the technology. I am not particularly excited about them hovering outside our windows looking over our shoulders at what magazines we read, whether we are reading any free market magazines that might be offensive to government officials. So I think we don't want people looking into our activities in our houses without a warrant. But I think in situations where people have already broken the law, there is lethal force being exposed and there are people in danger, why wouldn't we want to use a drone versus a policeman to save the life of a policeman going into a difficult situation. So I think those probably will come to fruition. That doesn't bother me. In some ways it is a little bit analogous to the situation we are talking about with drone strikes by the military in the United States. It is not so much that anybody is opposed to using a drone to shoot down a plane that is flying in to attack us, or people who are flying into a building to knock a building down, or flying into the Capitol. Nobody is opposed to using a drone when there is a lethal imminent force. The problem is it has gotten so convoluted. The President said an imminent threat doesn't have to be immediate. So that is the kind of thing we are concerned about. We are not concerned about an imminent or lethal threat where someone responds. What we are concerned about is a drone strike against a noncombatant. It seems as though it ought to be an easy question for the President. Couldn't he at least respond and say, I have always believed this, I just forgot to mention it, and we weren't very clear in the way we expressed it but, obviously, we would never use a drone against a noncombatant. He needs to say that, though, because the drones overseas are being used against noncombatants and we need to know what the rules are going to be. This is a long, drawn-out day, but it is to try to get some answers. It is to try to shame the President into doing the right thing. I think he knows what the right thing is. I think the President, part of him would like to do the right thing. But I think there is a certain stubbornness there too. I think there is a certain belief that he is the President and Presidents have all this power and he doesn't want to give up any of that power. I think some of that we see with Republicans and Democrats, frankly. When people leave the legislative branch and go to the White House, they think, I am a good person. I would never use power wrongly, so why would it be wrong if I got more power? Why would it be wrong if I said, I am going to use the fifth amendment, people will get due process, except for sometimes when I think they are bad people, and then I won't use the fifth amendment, they won't get due process. Privacy advocates say that drones help police snoop on citizens in ways that push current law to the breaking point. Ryan Calo, director for privacy and robotics at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society, says: Any time you have a tool like that in the hands of law enforcement that makes it easier to do surveillance, they will do more of it. This could be a time when people are uncomfortable and they want to place limits on that technology. It could make us question the doctrines that you do not have privacy in public. I think that is a good point. Maybe we will question some of the things we have said before about open spaces now that we can crisscross every inch of our open spaces. We have to imagine that we now have drones that weigh less than an ounce, so we are not even talking about the pictures of you coming down--some of us after a while don't want pictures of us in our bathing suit, whether it is 2 miles up or whether it is from 5 feet in front of us. So I can't imagine we would eventually rule that a drone could swoop down and be 10 feet over our fence. What is the question going to be? Can they be 10 feet over our fence or 2,000 feet in the air and still snoop without any kind of problem at all? Do we want to live in a police state is basically what the question is. Do we want to live in a surveillance state? It is going to take people to stand up and say enough is enough, that we are not going to do this, instead of everybody being like a herd of lemmings and going off the cliff saying, ``Lead me, lead me, take care of me.'' We have to ask the question that Franklin asked: Are you going to trade your liberty for security? Are you so fearful, are you so afraid that you are willing to trade your liberty for security? That is sort of the underlying question to this entire debate. The Los Angeles Times article continues: This can be a time when people are uncomfortable and they want to place limits on that technology. It could make us question the doctrine that you do not have privacy in public. This is from a June 13 article, 2012, in ``Wired'' magazine by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai: We like to think of the drone war as something far away, fought in the deserts of Yemen or the mountains of Afghanistan. But we now know it is closer than we thought. There are 64 drone bases on American soil. That includes 12 locations housing Predator and Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles, which can be armed. Public Intelligence, a non-profit that advocates for free access to information, released a map-- which is probably not a very good idea to release a map of where our drone bases are in the United States. The possibility of military drones as well as those controlled by police departments and universities flying over American skies have raised concerns among privacy activists. The other thing that should concern everybody, and probably people saw this as they had some university students seeing if they could commandeer a drone. So they had a drone fly over and the guy who didn't know the frequency all of a sudden within 2 minutes is commandeering the drone. There are questions whether that is what happened in Iran or whether the thing landed accidentally. I don't know the answer to that, but I think it is of concern that the drones could be commandeered and used by the people. It is also a concern that ultimately our enemies are going to have these drones too, and so while war is a messy thing and there are a lot of imperfections to war, I think the way we act in war should be the way we ultimately want to be treated in war. It is easier said than done and I don't think it is an easy doctrine, but it is something I think we should aspire to. The possibility of military drones as well as those controlled by police departments and universities flying over American skies has raised concerns among privacy activists. The American Civil Liberties Union explained in its December report that the machines potentially could be used to spy on American citizens. The drones' presence in our skies threaten to eradicate existing practical limits on aerial monitoring and allowing for pervasive surveillance, police fishing expeditions, and abusive use of these tools in a way that would eventually eliminate the privacy Americans have traditionally enjoyed in their movements and activities. I have told people that when I first read ``1984,'' I was bothered by it. Everybody is bothered by Big Brother being able to have these two- way televisions in your house and they see everything you do. You can't escape Big Brother. But part of the consolation I had and part of the feeling was, Well, they can't do this. The technology doesn't exist. When I was a kid it didn't exist. It is amazing, though, to think that Orwell writes this in 1949, before any of this technology. We were getting closer in the 1970s when I was a kid and now we are there, though. The technology is there. So while technology is not an enemy and technology is not something we can or should ban, technology makes our privacy more important, it makes the defense of our privacy something that needs to be guarded more jealously, because our government now does have the technology to see our every movement, to monitor our every move. So do our enemies, for that matter. So one can imagine, we don't want the police GPS tracking us and we probably don't want our political opponents tracking our car, either. So there have to be some protections of privacy. The issue and discussion of privacy has been one that conservatives and people on the right haven't always been as unified about. Libertarians on the right have been better with these issues and some conservatives have as well. But the question has always been, Do you have a right to privacy? I have always said, Sure, you have a right to privacy. I can't imagine why you wouldn't have a right to privacy. Some on the conservative side say, Well, you don't have a right to privacy; nobody talked about it in the Constitution. You don't necessarily have a right to privacy. I have to disagree because I think what is talked about in the Constitution are the freedoms we gave up or agreed to have limited. The freedoms that you didn't agree to have limited are unnamed. They are unenumerated. And the 9th and 10 amendments say they are to be left to the States and people. The 9th and 10th amendments say that there is a plethora of rights, there is an unlimited amount of rights and they are yours. They stay with you, unless the government explicitly takes these rights away from you. So the conclusion I come to with the right to privacy is I think you do have a right to privacy. I think we have a right to private property. Private property isn't listed in the Constitution, either, but I think all of our Founding Fathers believed in private property and some of them talked about actually putting the words in there. But I think some of them liked more the idea--instead of life, liberty, and property, they liked life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and I think it has a more noble ring to it because it is not talking about the property, but pursuit of happiness does involve the pursuit of gaining things you will own. One of the things about our government and about the rule of law, and one of the things that frankly I think a lot of people don't think about but that makes us an incredibly prosperous Nation is the certainty of the law. By that, what I mean is the certainty of ownership. This gets to sort of the idea of not only do we want these rights for the civil protections so we can't be incarcerated or accused of a crime falsely without being able to defend ourselves, we also want the rule of law to be consistent for everyone and not mutable. We don't want it to be arbitrary. We don't want the whims of any politician or any executive to be able to decide what the law is. This isn't the first time I have had some disagreement with the President on this. When we had some of the bankruptcies, when the car companies were going bankrupt, I believe it was with the Chrysler bankruptcy, that as things went through, there were people who were creditors and they owned part of the company. I learned this firsthand because I actually had some Fruit of the Loom. When Fruit of the Loom went bankrupt, I thought, well, I will get something, right? They will be bought out, and I will get some money when they are bought out. I did not get anything. I was an unsecured creditor. Apparently, in the Chrysler thing, so were the labor unions. Usually what happens is that as a company, unfortunately, goes bankrupt, all those contracts would be renegotiated, and really then the car companies could become competitive. They could become like Toyota or other successful companies that are nonunionized. And they might become successful again. But instead we took the actual bankruptcy law and turned it on its head. When we do this and when we bail out banks and things and change the rules at midpoint, it changes what investors do, and it changes that certainty investors need either in banks or in car companies. Pension plans invest in a lot of these things. So a lot of people think, oh, well, the President had preference for the union because he liked the union. Well, that is fine. But teachers are in a union too, and they had a pension plan, and they owned Chrysler stock, and they got ripped off because he changed the law and gave the money to the autoworkers' union. But he took it from somebody else. The problem is that you need those pension funds, some of which are for regular working folks. Firemen have them. Police have them. Teachers have them. It is one of the things that were not fully explained in the Romney campaign. He got so much grief for running these funds, but a lot of the people who became successful along with him and who made money were just average, ordinary citizens who are teachers, firemen, and policemen. Their pension plan was there in Bain Capital. I think that was never fully explained. But my point is, with the rule of law, that certainty is what creates wealth in our country. One of the reasons it is hard for Africa to get ahead--Africa has great resources--diamonds and minerals. One of the big reasons they do not get ahead is there is corruption in their government. Some of that corruption we aid and abet because we give foreign aid directly to corrupt governments that steal it. Mubarak was one of the richest men in the world--probably worth between $5 and $10 billion, maybe between $15 and $20 billion. We gave him $60 billion, so I guess we should be thankful he only stole one- third of it. Mobutu in Central Africa stole billions. There was no running water, no electricity. He and the soldiers around him lived high off the hog, and they took our money and stole it as well. But the problem is that not only do you have the kleptocracy and the stealing of foreign aid, but then you do not have the certainty of your property. A lot of capital formation in our country is based on your home loans. It used to be before the housing market went south, but it still is. It is where a lot of capital comes from, particularly for average, ordinary citizens borrowing against their house. If you do not have that certainty of the law, it is a problem. So what we are talking about today is more certainty of your liberty from unfair prosecution or unfair arrest or unfair death, ultimately, from a drone, which takes consistency of law, which takes that the Constitution will be adhered to and will be adhered to consistently and not in an arbitrary fashion. So it is important not only for your civil liberties, it is also important for your private property as well to have a rule of law. People talk about a rule of law, and they talk about it all the time. I do not think it fully gets through to everybody exactly what a rule of law means and how important it is. Hayek wrote that nothing more clearly distinguishes an arbitrary society from a stable society than the rule of law. He said that the rule of law is what gives that certainty to the marketplace. So it is not enough just to have freedom. You can have complete and random anarchic freedom, and you may well not get prosperity if you do not have a law that stabilizes things. You have to have a police force and a judiciary that enforces contracts. So that is a lot of what goes on in the developing world that they do not have. They have kleptocracy, which we aid and abet by giving them money and giving it to thieves because the thieves are our friends, not somebody else's friends. But then they also have this instability by not having a rule of law. The drones' presence in our skies ``threatens to eradicate existing practical limits on aerial monitoring . . . This comes from an article in Wired by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchieri. As Danger Room reported last month, even military drones, which are prohibited from spying on Americans, may ``accidentally'' conduct such surveillance--and keep the data for months afterwards while they figure out what to do with it. The material they collect without a warrant, as scholar Steven Aftergood revealed, could then be used to open an investigation. The Posse Comitatus Act prohibits the U.S. military from operating on American soil . . . So once again, if we go back to asking the President this question: Can you do military strikes on Americans on American soil, you know an easy answer is, I will obey the law. The law says he cannot do it. Yet he indicates that he is going to have different rules inside America than outside America for his drone strikes, which implies that he thinks he can do it. The Posse Comitatus Act expressly forbids the military from operating in the United States. So if he is going to kill Americans in America, it will either be in defiance of the Posse Comitatus Act or he is going to have to arm the FBI with drones to kill people. The problem is that I think once he gets into the FBI, the ludicrous nature of what he is asserting will really be paramount. I cannot imagine that he can argue at that point that we are not going to obey the Bill of Rights with the FBI because we already do with the FBI. So many of the answers are pretty simple here and pretty easy, and I just cannot imagine why he is resisting doing this. This new map comes out almost two months after the Electronic Frontier Foundation revealed another one, this time of public agencies--including police departments and universities--that have a permit issued by the Federal Aviation Agency to use [drones] in American airspace. ``It goes to show you how entrenched drones already are,'' said Trevor Timm, an EFF activist, when asked about the new map. ``It's clear that the drone industry is expanding rapidly and this map is just another example of that. And if people are worried about military technology coming back and being sold in the US, this is just another example [of] how drone technology is probably going to proliferate in the US very soon.'' This is another article from February of 2013. This is in Wired. It is called ``Domestic-Drone Industry Prepares for Big Battle with Regulators.'' For a day, a sandy-haired Virginian named Jeremy Novara was the hero of the nascent domestic drone industry. Novara went to the microphone at a ballroom in a Ritz- Carlton outside Washington, D.C. . . . and did something many in his business want to do: tenaciously challenge the drone regulators at the Federal Aviation Administration to loosen restrictions on unmanned planes over the United States. Judging from the reaction he received, and from the stated intentions of the drone advocates who convened the forum, the domestic-drone industry expects to do a lot more of that in the coming months. There's been a lot of hype around unmanned drones becoming a fixture over U.S. airspace. . . . You may have seen just 2 days ago, I think, a pilot coming into New York City saw one on the way down. And I saw the report, I think yesterday, saying they are still asking whose drone it was. You would think certainly we would have found out in 24 hours. I would think for certain it probably would be a government drone. But it is a little worrisome that they are seeing drones, that they do not know who is flying them or where they are as far as getting in the way of our commercial airliners. There's been a lot of hype around unmanned drones becoming a fixture over U.S. airspace, both for law enforcement use and for operations by businesses as varied as farmers and filmmakers. It sort of leads to another point--that it is not the technology that we are opposed to. There are going to be all kinds of private uses for drones. There have to be some rules for where they are flown so they do not get in the way of airplanes. But I would think farmers and ranchers might want to use drones to, I don't know, count their cattle or their sheep. I do not know if you do that. But there are going to be private uses for these drones that will not be objectionable. All have big implications for traditional conceptions of privacy, as unmanned planes can loiter over people's backyards and snap pictures for far longer than piloted aircraft. The government is anticipating that drone makers could generate a windfall of cash as drones move from a military to a civilian role. Jim Williams of the Federal Aviation Administration told [a conclave of the drone manufacturers conference] that the potential market for government and commercial drones could generate ``nearly $90 billion in economic activity . . . '' But there's an obstacle: the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA has been reluctant to grant licenses out of fear that the drones, which maneuver poorly, have an alarming crash rate, and are spoofible, don't have the sensing capacity to spot approaching aircraft, which could complicate and endanger U.S. airspace. The FAA has been criticized some by--there is a group called the Electronic Frontier Foundation--for not being transparent about its licenses. And they have filed Freedom of Information Act because they would like to know whether the intentions of those putting the drones up is benign or whether it involves some kind of surveillance. We talk a lot about the government spying on us, but I think there is great potential for your competitors, your enemies, and other people to spy on you with drones, particularly as they become cheaper. Those issues will be complicated. I think one way to sort of rectify or give an answer to those is to say your property from where it starts on the ground up is yours. People can fly over it, but I do not think they should be able to snoop and look down in it--I think probably private or public looking down on your property. That will be something, though, that the courts will continue to have to work out. There was a push last year by Congress and the Obama administration directing the FAA to fully integrate unmanned aircraft into American skies. It has not been nearly enough for the drone makers. The FAA is months late in designating six test sites for drones around the country. The question is when the test site selection will begin. ``I'm sure that's what all of you are asking now,'' says Williams, the head of the FAA's drone division. Drone makers are also frustrated by the logic of existing FAA regulations. Currently, a drone weighing under 55 pounds, flying below 400 feet within an operator's line of sight and away from an airport is considered a model airplane and cleared to fly without a license. That is, if it is not engaging in any for-profit activity--sort of. ``A farmer can be a modeller if they operate their aircraft as a hobby or for recreational purposes.'' Enter Novara, a 31-year-old who owns a small drone business in Falls Church, Va. called Vanilla Aircraft. ``If a farmer, who hopefully is profit-minded, can fly as a hobbyist an unmanned aircraft,'' Novara challenged Williams, ``why can't I, as the owner of an unmanned aircraft company, fly as a hobbyist my own unmanned aircraft over property that I own? The guidelines before this were that any commercial intent is prohibited, but . . . '' The bottom line is that there is going to be a lot of things we are going to enter into with private drones. But opposition to the technology, either for military purposes or for private purposes, is not something we are going after. What we are talking about is whether your privacy will be respected and whether your constitutional rights will be protected. This is a new article from today by Conor Friedersdorf. It is called ``Killing Americans on U.S. Soil: Eric Holder's Evasive, Manipulative Letter.'' On December 7, 1941, Japanese warplanes bombed the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Six decades later, al- Qaeda terrorists flew hijacked airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Neither President Roosevelt nor President . . . Bush targeted and killed Americans on U.S. soil in the aftermath of those attacks. Doing so wouldn't have made any sense. How strange, then, that Attorney General Eric Holder invoked those very attacks in a letter confirming that President Obama believes there are circumstances in which he could order Americans targeted and killed on U.S. soil. It is kind of strange. The things that he gives as justification are things in which we did not kill Americans. It's possible, I suppose, to imagine-- These are Eric Holder's words now. It's possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate under the Constitution and applicable laws for the President to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States. For example, the President could conceivably have no choice but to authorize the military to use force if necessary to protect the homeland in the circumstances of a catastrophic attack like what happened in 1941 and again on 9/11. This very scenario to be guarded against is a President using the pretext of a terrorist attack to seize extraordinary powers. Isn't that among the most likely scenarios for the United States turning into an authoritarian security state? To be sure, if Americans are at the controls of fighter jets en route to Hawaii, of course Obama could order that they be fired upon. If Americans hijacked a plane, of course it would be permissible to kill them before they could crash it into a building. But those are not the sorts of targeted killings we are talking about. What we are talking about is killing people not engaged in combat because you suspect them of being a terrorist. If you read to the end of Holder's letter, to the passage where he said-- This is Friedersdorf again. If you read to the end of Holder's letter, to the passage where he says, ``Were such an emergency to arise, I would examine the particular facts and circumstances before advising the president on the scope of his authority,'' it becomes clear that, despite invoking Pearl Harbor and 9/11, even he isn't envisioning a response to an attack in process, which would have to happen immediately. So what does he envision? If he can see that a ``for example'' is necessary to explain, he ought to give us a clarifying example rather than a nonsensical one that seems to name-check events for their emotional resonance more than for their aptness to the issue. Elsewhere in his letter, Holder writes that ``the US government has not carried out drone strikes in the United States and has no intention of doing so. As a policy matter moreover, we reject the use of military force where well- established law enforcement authorities in the country provide the best means for incapacitating a terrorist threat.'' Interesting they reject it ``as a policy matter,'' but aren't willing to reject military force in the United States as a legal matter-- That is a good distinction-- even in instances where law enforcement would better incapacitate the threat. For the Obama Administration, conceding that the executive branch is legally forbidden to do certain things is verboten,-- So it is kind of interesting. When they are willing to admit to any kind of limitations on their power they say: ``Policywise'' they might be limited, but they are not willing to say ``legally'' they are limited. This is a problem of not just this administration, but the previous one of thinking that any kind of inch that they give to another branch of government, that they will be losing some of their power and they are unwilling to do it. Friedersdorf goes on to say that: For the Obama administration, conceding that the executive branch is legally forbidden to do certain things is verboten, despite the fact that an unchecked executive is much more dangerous than the possibility of a future President failing to do enough to fight back against an actual attack on our homeland. Any thinking person can see that Holder's letter is non- responsive, evasive, and deliberately manipulative in its sly reassurances, right down to the rhetorically powerful but substantively nonsensical invocation of 9/11. (Being more subtle about it than Rudy Giuliani doesn't make it right.) To credulously accept this sort of response on an issue as important as this one is behavior unfit for any citizen of a free country, where safeguarding the rule of law is a civic responsibility. The time to discuss the appropriate scope of the president's authority is now. I know many would rather defer this, they would rather do this at another time. But the thing is, it is now. We brought the issue up. We have spent a lot of time on this issue. Why not have a discussion, instead of putting me off and saying: Oh, we will have a committee hearing on it. Sorry you are not on that committee, but we are going to have a committee hearing on this at a later date. It will never be discussed. Nothing ever happens around here. I mean, they promise you stuff. They say: We are going to take care of it. But it never happens. I think it never will. The time to discuss the appropriate scope of the president's authority-- This is Friedersdorf again. The time to discuss the appropriate scope of the president's authority is now, not in the aftermath of a catastrophic attack on the nation, as Holder suggests. The fact that he disagrees speaks volumes about team Obama's reckless shortsightedness. This is another article from Wired. This is from today. This is by Spencer Ackerman. The Obama administration calls it ``targeted killing.'' Steven Segal would call it getting marked for death. It's the practice of singling out an individual linked to a terrorist group, for killing, and it's been played out hundreds of times in the 9/11 era--including more recently against U.S. citizens like al-Qaida's YouTube preacher Anwar al-Awlaki. The Obama team has said next to nothing about how it works or what laws restrict it. Until Monday. Attorney General Eric Holder explained the administration's reasoning for killing American citizens overseas--and only overseas--with drone strikes and other means during a Monday speech at Northwestern University. Holder claimed that the government can kill ``a U.S. citizen who is a senior operational leader of al-Qaida or associated forces'' provided the government--unilaterally--determines that citizen poses ``an imminent threat of violent attack''-- Once again, a little bit of a problem on the imminent doctrine is that ``imminent'' does not have to mean ``immediate.'' --he can't be captured; and ``law of war principles,'' like the use of proportional force and the minimization of collateral damage, apply.'' The reason why some of this is important--even though he is talking about overseas now and not what we are trying to talk about here is that since we have not been given sort of the parameters for how they will kill Americans in America, we can only assume that they will work with the parameters they have overseas. The whole idea that an imminent threat is not immediate is problematic no matter where that doctrine is used. The idea that the law-of-war principles--I think proportional force is a good idea as far as trying to restrain how much force we use. But there are other things within the law of war that we need to be concerned about; things that happen in war are not quite the same kind of standard that we would have in the United States. Ackerman goes on and he says: This is an indicator of our times. This is actually Holder. This is an indicator of our times, not a departure from our laws and our values. The debate over killing Awlaki, whom Holder barely discussed, began long before a Hellfire missile fired from a drone killed him and fellow propagandist Samir Kahn in September. Awlaki's father sued the Obama administration in 2010 to compel it to reveal its legal rationale for the long-telegraphed strike. The administration refused, with a judge's support. For months after Awlaki's killing, the government never disclosed any evidence supporting its decision that Awlaki posed an imminent danger to Americans beyond his rhetoric of incitement. But during the February sentencing of the ``Underwear Bomber,'' the government put forward a court filing claiming that Awlaki worked intimately with convicted would-be bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab-- Who was the Underwear Bomber. --to blow up Northwest Airlines. Holder referred to that connection in his speech. Several legal scholars have wondered why the United States did not have to provide Awlaki with due process of law before killing him, as stipulated under the fifth amendment. Holder contended that the United States actually did, even if no judge ever heard the case. Well, this is sort of an interesting point. I am not making an opinion on whether the fifth amendment applies to al-Awlaki overseas. I think a lot of that is complicated and not necessarily certain whether you can apply the Constitution to people outside the United States, or whether an entity within the United States should obey the Constitution on people outside the United States. The bottom line is, in war you are not going to get due process. You are not going to get Miranda rights if you are fighting in battle. It is a little more debatable when you are not. The point is, though, that they are saying they are applying the fifth amendment sort of in private to al-Awlaki. The question is, if this is the standard that is going to be used in the United States, it is not going to be the actual use of the fifth amendment, which means a court and a jury, it is going to be the pretend use that is done behind closed doors. I am not so sure you can have the fifth amendment that does not involve a courtroom. I just do not understand a grand jury indictment, due process, not to be deprived of life and liberty. I do not how it happens in private. But that is the way they are administering the fifth amendment in private. They are using their discretion as to when to administer the fifth amendment. I do not know how that is going to work. I also do not think that is appropriate for U.S. citizens. So other than the President asking and answering a question as to whether noncombatants will be killed in America, we need to ask whether he is going to-- before he kills them, is he going to use the fifth amendment in private in the Oval Office, or is the fifth amendment going to be public? If it is public, I do not know how you kill someone. If you are going to get some kind of due process, you would have to get tried in a court. I am not sure how this would go forward. This is an additional quote from Holder from the same speech: The Constitution's guarantee of due process is ironclad, and it is essential--but, as a recent court decision makes clear, ``it does not require judicial approval before the president may use force abroad against a senior operational leader of a foreign terrorist organization with which the United States is at war, even if that individual happens to be a U.S. citizen.'' Well, that is kind of confusing. If that is going to be the standard here, I would be quite concerned. The standard over there--I think there are arguments on both sides of it. But the standard over here, I cannot imagine that this is the standard we are going to use. Because basically he is saying the Constitution applies unless we think it does not apply, and then decide it does not apply. But then he says, as long as we are at war. Well, who are we at war with? We are at war basically with anybody who does not like us around the world. I am not sure if there is ever an end to that. I think there are problems overseas. But particularly the problem is--I think the problem at hand that we are trying to get to the root of is, is this the standard? If you are using this standard overseas, are you going to use the standard here that basically the fifth amendment applies when we think it applies, and it does not apply when we do not think it applies? This is Ackerman, at this point, from Wired again. Holder did not explain why Awlaki's 16-year-old son, whom a missile strike killed two weeks after his father's death, was a lawful target. Holder did not explain how a missile strike represents due process, or what the standards for due process the government must meet when killing a U.S. citizen abroad. Holder did not explain why the government can only target U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism for death overseas and not necessarily domestically. As I said, a lot of these things overseas you can debate and try to decide whether this is a war zone or not a war zone. But they obviously do not apply in the United States. The most troubling thing about the killing of the 16-year-old son of Awlaki is the President's spokesman's response to this. You know, the flippant nature of it and the irresponsible nature for him to have said: Well, he should have chosen more responsible parents. If that is the standard we are going to have for killing Americans on American soil, that we are going to kill people who do not have responsible parents, we have set the bar pretty low for our killing program. I think al-Awlaki was killed--I don't know. I have not seen the classified information. I think the son was killed probably when they either targeted someone else or they did what they call these signature strikes where they don't know whom they are killing necessarily. They just think they are bad people, they came from a meeting of other bad people: The decision to kill an American, Holder said, is ``among the gravest that government leaders can face.'' Targeted killing is not assassination, he argued, because ``assassinations are unlawful killings.'' Among the few external limitations on the government's war power that Holder mentioned were the approval of a local government where the strikes occur--which must have pleased reluctant, unsteady U.S. Allies in Pakistan and Yemen. He is saying an interesting thing, and probably Pakistan has approved of most of the killings. However, Pakistan wants to come in and wants to convince and say: No, we haven't. They are doing it against our will, but my guess is they have been told. Some Members of Congress don't consider that a sufficient safeguard. ``The government should explain exactly how much evidence the president needs in order to decide that a particular American is part of a terrorist group,'' says Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who sits on the Senate's Intelligence Committee. ``It is also unclear to me whether individual Americans must be given the opportunity to surrender before lethal force is used against them. And I'm particularly concerned that the geographic boundaries of this authority have not been clearly laid out.'' The point on the geographic boundaries is a pretty important point because this is one of the concerning items about what they maintain. They say there are no geographic limitations. They say they get the authority for war everywhere around the world, as well as war here, because they say there were no geographic limitations to the use of authorization of force when we went to war in Afghanistan. I think people who voted for that--and I would have voted to go to war in Afghanistan--thought we were going to Afghanistan to fight the people who got us on 9/11. I don't think they thought, when they voted for that resolution, it meant we could have war in the United States under that resolution and that the standard would be one of the laws of war or one of martial law within the United States. I don't think anybody voting on it had that conclusion. That is a real problem. Those people are saying, including the administration is saying, no geographic limitations and, essentially, there are no temporal limitations. We have a perpetual war without any geographic limitations, which now they want to apply war principles to killing in the United States. Ackerman continues quoting Senator Wyden: ``And based on what I've heard so far, I can't tell whether or not the Justice Department's legal arguments would allow the President to order intelligence agencies to kill an American inside the United States.'' He is unclear about it, and he has seen a lot more information than I have because he is on the Intelligence Committee and sees secure and classified information. He is unsure of it. This makes me think nobody in the Senate or the Congress knows whether they are asserting whether they can kill Americans on American soil. Mary Ellen O'Connell, the vice president of the American Society of International Law, found Holder's legal rationale flimsy, stating: ``First, [Holder] restates the renamed global war on terror, which Obama himself condemned. Then he tries the United Nations Charter Article 51 but does not include the whole article: It says member states of the U.N. have an `inherent right of self-defense' if an armed attack occurs. Article 51 does not provide a legal green light for targeted killing,'' O'Connell said in an e-mail. ``Finally, he adds the argument that the U.S. may use force against States that are `unable or unwilling' to act. This argument has no basis in international law. It simply does not exist. So regardless of how carefully you target under the law of armed conflict, there is no right in the first instance to target at all.'' Without yielding the floor, I would like to entertain a question from the Senator from Utah.

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I am disappointed the Democrats choose not to vote on this. The answer around here for a lot of things is we will have a hearing at some later date to be determined. The problem is this is a nonbinding resolution. This is a resolution just stating we believe in the Constitution and, A, Mr. President, send us some information about your plan, how it is going to work. It doesn't change the law. In fact, I wish it could do more than that. We have an actual bill which will be introduced. We will actually try to change the law. This is a symbolic gesture and a way to allow us to move forward. I am disappointed we can't. This was an article that was published in Human Rights First in December of 2012. As I said, it has an opening statement by John Brennan I think is actually well thought out and recognizes some of the advantages and disadvantages of drone strikes. John Brennan begins by saying: We are establishing precedents that other nations may follow, and not all of those nations may--and not all of them will be nations that share our interests. Think about what he is saying there. Other people are going to get drones. We have already lost a drone in Iran. How long do you think it is before Iran has drones? How long do you think it is before Hezbollah has drones or Hamas has drones? I think there is a certain amount of thought that ought to go into a drone-killing program, particularly when the people who are being killed by the drones will have their own drones, I think within short order. The Obama administration has dramatically escalated targeted killing by drones as a central feature of his counterterrorism response. Over the past 2 years the administration has begun to speak more openly about the targeted killing program, including in public remarks by several senior officials. While we welcome and appreciate these disclosures, they nevertheless provided only limited information. Experts in other governments have continued to raise serious concerns about: The precedent that the United States targeted killing policy is setting for the rest of the world, including countries which have acquired or are in the process of acquiring drones, yet have long failed to adhere to the rule of law and protect human rights-- We would like to believe we actually have rules in place, and we would not misuse drones. Imagine what it is going to be like when countries get drones that have none of the rules, none of the checks and balances. The impact of the drone program on other U.S. counterterrorism efforts, including whether U.S. allies and other security partners have reduced intelligence sharing and other forms of counterterrorism cooperation because of the operational and legal concerns expressed by these countries; the impact of drone operations on other aspects of U.S. counterterrorism strategy, especially diplomatic and foreign assistance efforts designed to counter extremism, promote stability, and provide economic aid; the number of civilian casualties, including a lack of clarity on who the United States considers a civilian in these situations. Of note and of consideration also is whether the legal framework of the program that has been publicly asserted so far by the administration comports with international legal requirements. The totality of these concerns, heightened by the lack of public information surrounding the program, require the administration to better explain the program and its legal basis and to carefully review the policy in light of the global precedent it is setting and serious questions about the effectiveness of the program on the full range of U.S. counterterrorism efforts. While it is expected that elements of the U.S. Government's strategy for a targeted killing will be classified, it is in the national interest that the government be more transparent about policy considerations governing its use as well as its legal justification, and that the program be subject to regular oversight. Furthermore, it is in the U.S. national security interests to ensure that the rules of engagement are clear and that the program minimizes any unintended negative consequences. How the U.S. operates and publicly explains its targeted killing programs will have far-reaching consequences. The manufacture and sale of unmanned aerial vehicles is an increasing global industry and drone technology is not prohibitively complicated. I will give you an idea where there is a marketplace for drones. Last year, I introduced a bill to require a warrant before you could use a domestic drone to spy on citizens. Before I introduced it or anybody knew outside my office, we already had calls in lobbying coming from drone manufacturers. So this is a big business. Some 70 countries already possess UAVs, or drones, including Russia, Syria and Libya, and others are in the process of acquiring them. As White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan stated: The United States is ``establishing precedents that other nations may follow, and not all of them will be nations that share our interests or the premium we put on protecting human life, including innocent civilians.'' By declaring that it is an armed conflict with al Qaeda's ``associated forces,'' (a term it has not defined)-- I think this is an important point because everybody is always saying: Don't worry. You are fine. You are not a terrorist. We are only going after terrorists. The problem is, as I said, the government has defined terrorism in this country to mean things that may not include terrorists--paying cash, having weatherized ammunition--so there are a lot of different things they have used as a definition. But let's say they are going after al-Qaida, people working with them or associated forces--what that means I don't know, particularly since al-Qaida is a little hard to define because they do not have membership cards. Some of them probably don't use the label at all. I doubt many of them have any communication with any kind of central headquarters or central group called al-Qaida. By declaring that it is in an armed conflict with al Qaeda's ``associated forces,'' without articulating limits to that armed conflict, the United States is inviting other countries to similarly declare armed conflicts against groups they consider to be security threats for purposes of assuming lethal targeting authority. Moreover, by announcing that all ``members'' of such groups are legally targetable, the United States is establishing exceedingly broad precedent for those who can be targeted, even if it is not to utilize the full scope of this claimed authority. As an alternative to armed conflict-based targeting, U.S. officials have claimed that targeted killings are justified as self-defense responding to an imminent threat. . . . The problem is we have defined imminent to be not immediate. So having a murky definition of what imminent is allows us to run into problems. It is also not clear that the current broad targeted killing policy serves U.S. long-term strategic interests in combating international terrorism. Although it has been reported that some high-level operational leaders of al-Qaida have been killed in drone attacks, studies show the vast majority are not high-level terrorist leaders. National security analysts and former U.S. military officials increasingly argue that such tactical gains are outweighed by the substantial cost of the targeted killing program, including growing anti-American sentiment and recruiting support for al-Qaida. The broad targeted killing program has already strained U.S. relations with allies and thereby impeded the flow of critical intelligence about terrorist operations. The problem is, when we talk about this, one of the most important things to our intelligence is actually human intelligence. We get information from people who are our friends, who live in those countries, who blend into the population and are part of their population. But we have gone on to destroy some of this intelligence in the sense that one of the people who helped us to get bin Laden was a doctor in Pakistan by the name of Dr. Shakil Afridi. If we don't stand by the people who give us intelligence and give us information, we will not get more. But when he did help us, somehow his name was leaked. I don't know where the leak came from, but his name was leaked and then he was arrested by the Pakistanis. He is now in prison for the rest of his life. I have asked several times, both to the previous Secretary of State as well as to the current Secretary of State, and I asked the current Secretary of State point-blank and directly: Will you use the leverage of foreign aid to say we are not going to give you foreign aid if you don't release this doctor who gave us information? It is a little ironic that we will not do it, particularly since at one point in time we actually had, I think, a $25 million reward for any information that led to helping us get bin Laden. So it is kind of disappointing that we haven't held out and supported our human intelligence and people such as Dr. Afridi, who helped us get probably the most notorious terrorist of the last century. While the U.S. Government does not report the number of deaths from drone strikes, independent groups have estimated that the drone program has claimed several thousand lives so far. Estimates and public comments by some Senators have said as many as 4,700. What we don't know about the 4,700 but what would be an important statistic, I think, or maybe a troubling statistic, would be how many of the 4,700 were killed in combat--actually holding weapons, fighting, going to a battle, coming from a battle--and how many of the drone strikes were actually on people who weren't involved in combat. I think if that number were released, if that number were made public, it would concern you even more because you may well find out a lot of the people--and we have seen some of the strikes on television, with people in their cars, people walking around without weapons, people eating dinner, people at home in their houses. I am not saying these are good people necessarily, I am just saying the drone strike program we have in place currently seems to have a very low threshold for whom they kill. So the question would be whether you are going to use that kind of standard if you have a domestic drone strike program in the United States. I think we are getting to the point, and that is one of the most important questions as we look at the foreign drone program, is understanding what the parameters are that allow us to kill people in foreign countries and are those the parameters that are going to be used here. For the most part, over the last decade, they haven't admitted we even have a drone strike program. But now that they admit it, the President doesn't want to answer any questions about it. He doesn't want to deny he will use it here. He just says he isn't intending to use it here but then says: Oh, probably there will be different rules inside the United States than outside the United States. This is where the Senate ought to get involved, instead of punting this to another time. The Senate ought to say we are not going to wait for the President to send us a memo. We are going to send him a memo. We are going to tell him what the rules on drone strikes are. We are going to tell him the Constitution does apply to Americans, particularly Americans in the United States, and there are no exceptions. I find it inexcusable that the Attorney General says: Well, the fifth amendment, we will use it as needed, basically. We will use it when we choose. The problem with that is I don't think the executive branch should get to pick and choose. Without yielding the floor, I am going to allow a question from my colleague from Texas.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, I rise today to begin to filibuster John Brennan's nomination for the CIA. I will speak until I can no longer speak. I will speak as long as it takes until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important, that your rights to trial by jury are precious, that no American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a court. That Americans could be killed in a cafe in San Francisco or in a restaurant in Houston or at their home in Bowling Green, KY, is an abomination. It is something that should not and cannot be tolerated in our country. I do not rise to oppose John Brennan's nomination simply for the person. I rise today for the principle. The principle is one that, as Americans, we have fought too long and hard for to give up on, to give up on the Bill of Rights, to give up on the fifth amendment protection that says no person shall be held without due process, that no person shall be held for a capital offense without being indicted. This is a precious American tradition and something we should not give up on easily. They say Lewis Carroll is fiction; Alice never fell down a rabbit hole, and the White Queen's caustic judgments are not really a threat to your security. Or has America the beautiful become Alice's Wonderland? ``No, no!'' said the Queen. ``Sentence first--verdict afterwards.'' ``Stuff and nonsense!'' Alice said loudly. ``The idea of having the sentence first.'' ``Hold your tongue!'' said the Queen, turning purple. ``I won't!'' said Alice. [``Release the drones,''] said the Queen, as she shouted at the top of her voice. Lewis Carroll is fiction, right? When I asked the President: Can you kill an American on American soil, it should have been an easy answer. It is an easy question. It should have been a resounding and unequivocal no. The President's response: He hasn't killed anyone yet. We are supposed to be comforted by that. The President says: I haven't killed anyone yet. . . . He goes on to say: and I have no intention of killing Americans, but I might. Is that enough? Are we satisfied by that? Are we so complacent with our rights that we would allow a President to say he might kill Americans, but he will judge the circumstances, he will be the sole arbiter, he will be the sole decider, he will be the executioner in chief if he sees fit? Some will say he would never do this. Many people give the President consideration. They say he is a good man. I am not arguing he is not. What I am arguing is that the law is there, set in place for the day when angels don't rule government. Madison said that the restraint on government was because government will not always be run by angels. This has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with whether the President is a Democrat or a Republican. Were this a Republican President, I would be here saying exactly the same thing: No one person, no one politician should be allowed to judge the guilt--to charge an individual, to judge the guilt of an individual, and to execute an individual. It goes against everything we fundamentally believe in our country. This is not even new to our country. There is 800 years of English law that we founded our tradition on. We founded it upon the Magna Carta from 1215. We founded it upon Morgan of Glamorgan from 725 A.D. We founded it upon the Greeks and Romans who had juries. It is not enough to charge someone to say that they are guilty. Some might come to this floor and they might say: What if we are being attacked on 9/11? What if there are planes flying at the Twin Towers? Obviously we repel them. We repel any attack on our country. If there is a gentleman or a woman with a grenade launcher attacking our buildings or our Capitol, we use lethal force. You don't get due process if you are involved with actively attacking us, our soldiers, or our government. You don't get due process if you are overseas in a battle, shooting at our soldiers. But that is not what we are talking about. The Wall Street Journal reported and said that the bulk of the drone attacks is signature attacks. They do not even know the name of the person. A line or a caravan is going from a place where we think there are bad people to a place where we think they might commit harm and we kill the caravan, not a person. Is that the standard we will now use in America? Will we use a standard for killing Americans to be that we thought you were bad, we thought you were coming from a meeting with bad people and you were in a line of traffic and so therefore you were fine for the killing? That is the standard we are using overseas. Is that the standard we are going to use here? I will speak today until the President responds and says: No, we won't kill Americans in cafes. No, we won't kill you at home in your bed at night. No, we won't drop bombs on restaurants. Is that so hard? It is amazing that the President will not respond. I have been asking this question for a month. It is like pulling teeth to get the President to respond to anything and I get no answer. The President says he hasn't done it yet and I am to be comforted. You are to be comforted in your home. You are to be comforted in your restaurant. You are to be comforted in online communicating in your e- mail that the President has not killed an American yet in the homeland. He says he has not done it yet. He says he has no intention to do so. Hayek said that nothing more distinguishes arbitrary government from a government that is run by the whims of the people than the rule of law. The law is an amazingly important thing, an amazingly important protection. For us to give up on it so easily doesn't speak well of what our Founding Fathers fought for, what generation after generation of American soldiers has fought for, what soldiers are fighting for today when they go overseas to fight wars for us. It doesn't speak well of what we are doing here to protect the freedom at home when our soldiers are abroad fighting for us that we say our freedom is not precious enough for one person to come down and say: Enough is enough, Mr. President, come clean, come forward and say you will not kill Americans on American soil. The oath of office of the President says that he will, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. He raises his right hand, he puts his left hand on the Bible, and he says ``will.'' The President doesn't say, I intend to if it is convenient; I intend to unless circumstances dictate otherwise. The President says, ``I will defend the Constitution. I will protect the Constitution.'' There is not room for equivocation here. This is something that is so important, so fundamental to our country that he needs to come forward. When Brennan, whose nomination I am opposing today, was asked directly: Is there any limit to your killing? Is there any geographic limitation to your drone strike program? Brennan responded and said: No, there is no limitation. So the obvious question would be, if there is no limitation on whom you can kill and where you can kill and there is no due process upon whom you will kill, does that mean you will do it in America? The Senator from Oregon asked him that question directly, in committee. And this so-called champion of transparency, this so-called advocate of some kind of process, responded to the Senator from Oregon by saying: I plan to optimize secrecy and optimize transparency. Gobbledygook. You were asked: Will you kill Americans on American soil? Answer the question. Our laws forbids the CIA from doing that. It should have been an easy question. The 1947 National Security Act says the CIA doesn't operate in our country. We have the FBI, we have rules, we have separated powers to protect your rights. That is what government was organized to do. That is what the Constitution was put in place to do, to protect your rights. So when I asked, he says: No answer. He says: I will evade your answer, and by letting him come forward we let him get away with it. I have hounded and hounded and finally yesterday I get a response from Mr. Brennan, who wishes to be the CIA chief, and he finally says: I will obey the law. Well, hooray. Good for him. It took a month to get him to admit that he will obey the law. But it is not so simple. You see, the drone strike program is under the Department of Defense, so when the CIA says they are not going to kill you in America, they are not saying the Defense Department won't. So Eric Holder sent a response, the Attorney General. His response says: I haven't killed anyone yet. I don't intend to kill anyone. But I might. He pulls out examples that are not under consideration. There is the use of local force that can always be repelled--if our country is attacked, the President has the right to protect and defend the country. Nobody questions that. Nobody questions if planes are flying toward the Twin Towers whether they can be repelled by the military. Nobody questions whether a terrorist with a rocket launcher or grenade launcher is attacking us, whether they can be repelled. They do not get their day in court. But if you are sitting in a cafeteria in Dearborn, if you happen to be an Arab American who has a relative in the Middle East and you communicate with them by e-mail and someone says your relative is someone we suspect of being associated with terrorism, is that enough to kill you? For goodness sake, wouldn't we try to make an arrest and come to the truth by having a jury and a presentation of the facts on both sides of the issue? See, the real problem here is one of the things we did a long time ago is we separated the police power from the judicial power. This was an incredibly important first step. We also prevented the military from acting in our country because we did not want to have a police state. One of the things we greatly objected to of the British is they were passing out general writs or writs of assistance. These were warrants that allowed them to go into a house but allowed them to go into anyone's house. What we did when we wrote our Constitution is we made the Constitution--we made the fourth amendment specific to the person and the place and the things to be looked for. We did not like the soldiers going willy-nilly into any house and looking for anything. So we made our Constitution much more specific. I think this is something we should not give up on so easily. I think the idea that we could deprive someone of their life without any kind of hearing, essentially allowing a politician--I am not casting any aspersions on the President. I am not saying he is a bad person at all. But he is not a judge. He is a politician. He was elected by a majority, but the majority doesn't get to decide whom we execute. We have a process for deciding this and we have courts for deciding this. To allow one man to accuse a person in secret and to never get notified that they have been accused--their notification is the buzz of the propellers on the drone as it flies overhead in the seconds before they are killed. Is that what we want from our government? Are we so afraid of terrorism and so afraid of terrorists that we are willing to just throw out our rights and our freedoms and what we have fought for and have gotten over the centuries? We have at least 800--if not 1,000--years' worth of protections. Originally, the protections were against a monarch. We feared a monarch. We didn't like having a monarch. When we came to this country and set up our Presidency, there was a great deal of alarm. There was a great deal of fear over having a king, and so we limited the executive branch. Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers that the Constitution supposes what history demonstrates, which is that the executive branch is the branch most prone to a war, most likely to go to war, and, therefore, we took that power to declare war and vested it in the legislature. We broke up the powers. Montesquieu wrote about the checks and balances and the separation of powers. He was somebody whom Jefferson looked toward. They separated the powers because there is a chance for abusive power when power resides in one person. Montesquieu said there can be no liberty when the executive and the legislative branches are combined. I say something similar; that is, there can be no liberty when the executive and the judiciary branches are combined, and that is what we are doing here. We are allowing the President to be the accuser in secret, we are allowing him to be the judge, and we are allowing him to be the jury. No man should have that power. We should fear that power not because we have to say: Oh, we fear the current President. It has nothing to do with who the President is. It has nothing to do with whether someone is a Republican or Democrat. It has to do with whether we fear the consolidation of power, whether we fear power being given to one person, be it a Republican or a Democrat. This is not necessarily a right-left issue. Kevin Gosztola, who writes at firedoglake.com, writes that the mere fact that the President's answer to the question of whether you can kill an American on American soil was yes is outrageous. However, it fits the framework for fighting a permanent global war on terrorism without any geographic limitations, which President Obama's administration has maintained it has the authority to wage. What is important to note is that we are talking about a war without geographic limitations, but we are also talking about a war without temporal limitations. This war has no limit in time. When will this war end? It is a war that has an infinite timeline. If we are going to suspend our rights, if there is going to be no geographic limits to killing--which means we are not at war in Afghanistan, we are at war everywhere. Everybody who pops up is al-Qaida. Whether they have heard of al-Qaida or whether they have had any communication with some network of al-Qaida, it is al-Qaida. There is a new war going on everywhere in the world, and there are no limitations. Glenn Greenwald has also written about this subject, and he was speaking at the Freedom to Connect conference. He said there is a theoretical framework being built which posits that the U.S. Government has unlimited power. Some call this inherent power. ``Inherent'' means it has not been defined anywhere; it has not been expressly given to the government. They have decided this is their power and they are going to grab it and take what they get. This is not new. The Bush administration did some of this too. When the Bush administration tried to grab power, the left--and some of us on the right--were critical when they tried to wiretap phones without a warrant. Many on the right and many on the left raised a raucous. There was a loud outcry against President Bush for usurping, going across due process, not allowing due process, and not obeying the restraints of warrants. Where is that outcry now? Glenn Greenwald writes: There is a theoretical framework being built that posits that the U.S. Government has unlimited power, when it comes to any kind of threats it perceives, to take whatever action against them that it wants without any constraints or limitations of any kind. As Greenwald suggests--and this goes back to Gosztola's words-- answering yes to the question that you can kill Americans on American soil illustrates the real radicalism the government has embraced in terms of how it uses its own power. We were opposed to them listening to our conversations without a warrant, but no one is going to stand and say anything about killing a person without a warrant, a judge's review or a jury? No one is going to object to that? Where is the cacophony who stood and said: How can you tap my phone without going to a judge first? I ask: How can you kill someone without going to a judge or a jury? Are we going to give up our rights to any politician of any stripe? Are we going to give up the right to decide who lives and who dies? Gosztola goes on to say the reason the administration didn't want to answer yes or no to this question--can you kill Americans on American soil--is because he says a ``no'' answer would jeopardize the critical, theoretical foundation they have very carefully constructed that says there are no cognizable constraints on how U.S. Government power can be asserted. Civil libertarians once expected more from the President. In fact, it was one of the things I liked about the President. I am a Republican. I didn't vote for or support the President either time, but I admired him. I particularly admired him when he ran in 2007. I admired his ability to stand and say: We will not torture people. That is not what America does. How does the President's mind work? The President--who seemed so honorable, so concerned with our rights, so concerned with the right not to have our phone tapped--now says he is not concerned with whether a person can be killed without a trial. The leap of logic is so fantastic as to boggle the mind. Where is the Barack Obama of 2007? Has the Presidency so transformed him that he has forgotten his moorings and what he stood for? Civil libertarians once expected more from the President. Ask any civil libertarian whether the President should have the right to arbitrarily kill Americans on American soil, and the answer is easy. Of course no President should have the right or that power under the Constitution. Brennan has responded in committee that now the CIA does not have the right to do it on American soil. The problem is that this program is under the Department of Defense, so it is, once again, an evasive answer. They are not answering the true question: Will the Government of America kill Americans on American soil? Gosztola, from firedoglake.com, writes that there may never be a targeted killing of a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil--and the question of whether a U.S. citizen could be targeted and killed on U.S. soil may remain a hypothetical question for some time--but the fact that the Obama administration has told a U.S. Senator there is a circumstance where the government could target and kill an American citizen on American soil without charge and without trial is a stark example of an imperial Presidency. This is what our Founding Fathers wanted to fight against. They wanted to limit the role and the power of the President. They wanted to check the President's power with the power of the Senate, the power of the House, and the power of the judiciary. We have three coequal branches. Not one of them should be able to run roughshod on the other. The problem is we have allowed this to happen--not me personally, but Congress in general has allowed the President to usurp this power. If there were an ounce of courage in this body, I would be joined by many other Senators in saying we will not tolerate this, that we will come together, in a bipartisan fashion, and tell any President that no President will ever have the authority to kill Americans without a trial. When the President says he does intend to do so, we have to think that through. One year ago, the President signed a law that says a person can be detained indefinitely and that they can be sent from America to Guantanamo Bay without a trial. He wants us to be comforted by that. He wants us to remember and think well of him because he says: I don't intend to do so. It is not enough. I mean, would we be able to tolerate a Republican who stood and said: I like the first amendment, I am quite fond of the first amendment, and I don't intend to break the first amendment, but I might. Would conservatives tolerate someone who said: I like the second amendment, I think it is important and I am for gun ownership and I don't intend to violate the second amendment, but I might. Would we tolerate that he doesn't intend to do so as a standard? We have to think about the standards being used overseas. Google interviewed him not too long ago and asked him if he could kill Americans at home. He was evasive. He said there are rules. He said the rules outside would be different than inside. I certainly hope so. Outside the United States the rules for killing are that someone can be killed through a signature strike. We don't have to know what that person's name is, who they are or whom they are with. If a person is in a line of traffic and we think they are going from talking to bad people to talking to other bad people, we can kill that person. Is that going to be the standard in America? When they are asked if they have killed civilians in their drone strikes, they say no. However, a person is not counted as a civilian if they are male or if they are between the ages of 16 and 50. They are considered a potential and probable combatant if they are in the 16-to-50 age range. My question is: If you are not a civilian, if you are in proximity to bad people, is that the standard we are going to use in the United States? If we are going to kill Americans on American soil and the standard is going to be signature strikes of a person who is close to bad people or in the same proximity of bad people, is that enough? Are we happy with that standard? Are we happy we have no jury, no trial, no charges, and nothing done publicly? Eric Holder, the Attorney General's response to me is that they maintain they are not going to do this. We should just trust them. It is not about them, though. It is about the law. The law restrains everyone equally, regardless of their party or whether they are Republican or Democrat. The law is out there for the time when somebody inadvertently elects a truly bad person. When World War I ended, the currency was being destroyed in Germany. In 1923, paper money became so worthless that people wheeled it in wheelbarrows; they burned it for fuel. It became virtually worthless overnight. At the beginning of September 1923, I think it was like 10 or 15 marks for a loaf of bread. On September 14, it was 1,000 marks. On September 30, it was 100,000 marks. By October 15, it was a couple of million marks for a loaf of bread. It was a chaotic situation. Out of that chaos, Hitler was elected democratically. They elected him out of this chaos. My point is not that anybody in our country is Hitler. I am not accusing anybody of being that evil. I think it is an overplayed and misused analogy. What I am saying is that in a democracy we could someday elect someone who is very evil, and that is why we don't give the power to the government. It is not an accusation of this President or anybody in this body; it is a point to be made historically that occasionally even a democracy gets it wrong. So when a democracy gets it wrong, we want the law to be there in place. We want this rule of law. As I mentioned, Hayek said that this is what distinguished us. Nothing distinguishes us more clearly from arbitrary government and a government of whims than a rule of law, and a stable and consistent government is the rule of law. Heritage has an author who has written some about the oath of office. His name is Kesavan. He writes that the location and the phrasing of the oath of office for the President--this is something I mentioned earlier, that the President says he will protect and defend and preserve the Constitution--words are important. The oath doesn't say, I intend to preserve, protect, and defend; it says, I will. Kesavan writes, though, that the location and phrasing of the oath of office strongly suggests that it is not empowering but limiting. So the President doesn't take an oath of office that says: I intend to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, but I also feel that I have inherent powers that were never mentioned by anybody that I will be the sole arbiter of interpreting what those powers are. That sounds more like a king. That is not what we wanted. We did not want an imperial Presidency. What Kesavan suggests is that the oath of office is not empowering but that it is limiting, that the clause limits the President and how the President can execute or how the Executive power can be exercised. One unanswered word in that Constitution includes the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. What does the Fifth Amendment say? The Fifth Amendment says that no person shall be held to answer for a capital or otherwise infamous crime unless on presentment or indictment of a grand jury. It is pretty explicit. The Fifth Amendment protects us. It protects us from a King placing a person in the tower, but it also should protect us from a President who might kill us with a drone. We were granted due process. It is not always easy to sort out the details of who is a threat to the country and who is not a threat to the country. If it were people with grenade launchers on their shoulders, that is easy. In fact, I agree completely. A person does not get due process if they are actively attacking America. But we have to realize there have been reports that over half of the drone strikes overseas are not even directed toward an individual, they are directed toward a caravan of unnamed individuals. Overseas, I have no problems. If people are shooting at American soldiers overseas, by all means, they get no due process. But we also have to realize that many--we don't know because they won't tell us the number, but many of the drone strikes overseas are done when a person is walking, whether to church, a restaurant, or along the road; they are done when a person is in a car driving; they are done when a person is in a house eating or in a restaurant eating; or they are done when a person is in a home sleeping. I am not even saying all those people didn't deserve what they got, but I am saying they were not actively involved in something that is an imminent threat, and if they were in America, they would be arrested. If we think a person is a terrorist in America, we should arrest them. But here is the question: Who is a terrorist? That is why I have been so concerned with a lot of people around here who want to say if you are associated with terrorism. The reason is that our government has already put out things that I think are of a questionable nature. The Bureau of Justice put out a bulletin within the last year describing people we need to be worried about. These are the people we are supposed to say something about if we see something. Who are these terrorists who live among us? People who might be missing fingers on one hand; people who might have stains on their clothing; people who might have changed the color of their hair; people who like to pay in cash; people who own more than one gun; people who own weatherized ammunition; people who have 7 days of food in their house--these are people we should be afraid of and we should report to our government, so says our government. Are they going to be on the drone strike list? I think we need to get an answer from the President. If you are going to kill people in America, we need rules, and we want to know what your rules are because I certainly don't want to have 7 days of food in my house if that is on the list of terrorism. There are some governmental Web sites that advise us to have food in our house. If we live in a hurricane-prone area, we are supposed to keep some extra food around. Who is going to decide when it is OK to have food in our house and when it is not? There is something called a fusion center. Fusion centers are supposed to coordinate between the Federal Government and the local government to find terrorists. The one in Missouri a couple of years ago came up with a list, and they sent this to every policeman in Missouri. This kind of concerns me. The people on the list might include me. The people on the list from the fusion center in Missouri whom we need to be worried about and whom policemen should stop are people who have bumper stickers that might be pro-life; people who have bumper stickers that might be for more border security; people who support third-party candidates; people who might be in the Constitution Party. And isn't there some irony there--people who might be in the Constitution Party, who believe in the Constitution so much, they might be a terrorist. So I think we need to be concerned about this. Things are not so black and white. If someone is shooting a gun at us--a cannon, a missile, a rocket, a plane--it is pretty easy to know what lethal attacks are and to repel them, and there should be no due process. But we are talking about people in their home. We are talking about people in a restaurant or a cafe that someone is making an accusation against. If the accusation is based on how many fingers you have on your hand, I have a problem with that standard. If the standard to be used for killing Americans is whether a person pays in cash, I have a problem with that. If the standard to be used in America is being close to someone who is bad or the government thinks is bad is enough for you to be killed and not even to count you as an accidental kill but to count you as a combatant because you were near them--see, here is the problem, and this is no passing problem, this is an important problem. There was a man named al-Awlaki. He was a bad guy. By all evidence available to the public that I have read, he was treasonous. I have no sympathy for his death. I still would have tried him in a Federal court for treason, and I think he could have been executed. But his son was 16 years old, and he missed his dad, who had been gone for 2 years. His son sneaks out of the house and goes to Yemen. His son is then killed by a drone strike. They won't tell us if he was targeted. I suspect, since there were other people in the group--there were about 20 people killed--that they were targeting someone else. I don't know that. I don't have inside information on that, but I suspect that. Here is the real problem. When the President's spokesman was asked about al-Awlaki's son, do my colleagues know what his response was? This I find particularly callous and particularly troubling. The President's response to the killing of al-Awlaki's son--he said he should have chosen a more responsible father. It is kind of hard to choose who your parents are. That is sort of like saying to someone whose father is a thief or a murderer or a rapist--obviously a bad thing, but does that mean it is OK to kill their children? Think of the standard we would have if our standard for killing people overseas is that you should have chosen a more responsible parent. It just boggles the mind and really affects me to think that would be our standard. There is absolutely no excuse for the President not to come forward on this. I have been asking for a month for an answer. It is like pulling teeth to get any answer from the President. Why is that? Because he doesn't want to answer the question the way he should as a good and moral and upstanding person--someone who believes in the Constitution should--that absolutely no American should ever be killed in America who is sitting in a cafe. No American should ever be killed in their house without a warrant and some kind of aggressive behavior by them. There is nothing American about being bombed in one's sleep. There is nothing constitutional about that. The President says to trust him. He says he hasn't done it yet. He says he doesn't intend to do so but he might. That is just not good enough. It is not enough for me to be placated. It is not enough for me to be quiet. So I have come here today to speak for as long as I can. I won't be able to speak forever, but I am going to speak for as long as I can to draw attention to something that I find really to be very disturbing. People have asked about this nomination process because I have actually voted for a couple of the President's nominees, some of whom I have objected to, some of whom I have had personal differences with as well as political differences with. This is not about partisanship. I voted for Secretary of State John Kerry. I have almost nothing in common with him politically. I have disagreed with him repeatedly on the floor. But I gave the President the prerogative of choosing his Secretary of State because I think the President won the election and he deserves to get to make some choices on who is in his Cabinet. I voted for the very controversial Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel. There were things I liked about him and things I disliked about him. I filibustered him twice before I allowed him to go forward, and people have given me a hard time. Conservatives from my party have blasted me for doing that, but I gave the President that prerogative. So I am not standing here as a Republican who will never vote for a Democrat. I voted for the first three nominees by the President. This is not about partisanship. I have allowed the President to pick his political appointees, but I will not sit quietly and let him shred the Constitution. I cannot sit at my desk quietly and let the President say he will kill Americans on American soil who are not actively attacking a country. The answer should be so easy. I can't imagine that he will not expressly come forward and say: No, I will not kill Americans on American soil. The Fifth Amendment says that no person shall be held for a capital or otherwise infamous crime unless on the presentment or indictment of a grand jury. It goes on to say that no person will be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process. Now, some hear ``due process,'' and if a person is not a lawyer--I am not a lawyer--when we first hear it, we think, what does that mean? What does it mean to have due process? What it means is we are protected. We get protections. Is our justice system perfect? No. Sometimes a person goes all the way through due process in our country, and we have actually convicted people who are innocent. Fortunately, it is very rare, but we have actually convicted people who are innocent. What are the chances that our President, going through a PowerPoint slide show and flashcards, might make a mistake on innocence or guilt? I would say there is a chance. Even our judicial system, which goes through all of these processes, including a judge reviewing the indictment, a jury reviewing it, and then a sentencing phase and all of that going forward--we sometimes make mistakes. What are the chances that one man, one politician, no matter what party they are from, could make a mistake on this? I think there is a real chance that exists. That is why we put these rules in place. Patrick Henry wrote that the Constitution wasn't given or written or put down to restrain you; the Constitution was to restrain us. There has always been, since the beginning of the time we first had government, this desire to restrain the government, to try to keep the government from growing too strong or to try to keep the government from taking your rights. It is interesting that when we look at the Constitution, the Constitution gave what are called enumerated powers to government. Madison said these enumerated powers were few and defined. The liberties we were given, though, are numerous and unlimited. So there are about 17 powers given to government which we have now transformed into about a gazillion or at least a million new powers--we don't pay much attention to the enumerated powers or to the Constitution anymore. But the Constitution left our rights as unenumerated; they aren't limited. Your rights are limitless. So when we get to the 9th and 10th Amendments, they say specifically that those rights not granted to your government are left to the States and the people respectively. It didn't list what those rights are. The 14th Amendment talks about privileges and immunities being left to you also. They are to be protected. I don't think there is a person in America--that is why I can't understand the President's unwillingness to say he is not going to kill noncombatants. Think about that. He is unwilling to say publicly that he is not going to kill noncombatants, because that is what we are talking about here. I am not talking about someone with a bazooka or a grenade launcher on their shoulder. Anyone committing lethal force can be repelled with lethal force. No one argues that point. I am talking about whether you can kill noncombatants because many of the people being killed overseas are noncombatants. Are they potential combatants? Maybe. Maybe the standard can be less overseas than it is here for people involved in a battle, but it is getting kind of murky overseas as well. For goodness' sake, in America we can't just have this idea that we are going to kill noncombatants. We are talking about people eating in a cafe, at home, in a restaurant. I think we need to be a little more careful. The power that was given by the Constitution to the Senate was that of advise and consent. This constitutional provision provides us with the power to consent to nominations or withhold consent. It is a check on the executive branch, but it only works if we actually use it. I am here to speak for as long as I can hold up to try to rally support from people from both sides to say: For goodness' sake, why don't we use some advise and consent? Why don't we advise the President he should come forward and say he will not condone nor does he believe he has the authority to kill noncombatants? As a check on the executive branch, this power that is granted to the Senate is the right to withhold consent. The Constitution does not provide Senators with the specifics or the criteria of why we withhold consent. That is left to us to decide. I withhold my consent today because I am deeply concerned the executive branch has not provided an answer, that the President refuses to say he will not kill noncombatants. The President swore an oath to the Constitution. He said he will protect, defend, and preserve the Constitution. He did not say: I intend to when it is convenient. He said: I will defend the Constitution. It is inexcusable for him not to come forward. There is an author who writes for The Atlantic who has written a lot about the drone program by the name of Conor Friedersdorf. He recounts the tale of al-Awlaki's son who was killed. He said when the President's spokesman was asked about the strike that killed him, the President's spokesman replied: Well, he would have been fine if he ``had a more responsible father.'' If that is our standard, we have sunk to a real low. Cornered by reporters after this, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs attempted to defend the kill list, which is secret, of course. We have to remember, if we are going to kill noncombatants in America or people we think might someday be combatants, the list will be secret. So one will not get a chance to protest: Hey, I am not that bad. I might have said that at one time, but I am not that bad. All right. I have objected to big government, not all government. I am not fomenting revolution. I was critical at that meeting. I was at a tea party meeting, and I was critical of the President, but I am not a revolutionary. Please, don't kill me. Should we live in a country where we have to be worried about what we say? Should we live in a country where we have to worry about what we write? What kind of country would that be? Why is there not more moral outrage? Why is there not every Senator coming down to say: You are exactly right. Let's go ahead and hold this nomination and why don't we hold it until we get more clarification from the President. Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic writes: . . . it's vital for the uninitiated to understand how Team Obama misleads when it talks about its drone program. Asked how their kill list can be justified, Gibbs-- The President's spokesman-- replies that ``when there are people who are trying to harm us, and have pledged to bring terror to these shores, we've taken that fight to them.'' Since the kill list itself is secret, there's no way to offer a specific counterexample. It is one thing to say: Yes, these people are going to probably come and attack us, which, to tell you the truth, is probably not always true. There are people fighting a civil war in Yemen who probably have no conception of ever coming to America. Friedersdorf goes on to say: But we do know that U.S. drones are targeting people who've never pledged to carry out attacks in the United States. So we are talking about noncombatants who have never pledged to carry out attacks are being attacked overseas. Think about it, if that is going to be the standard at home: people who have never truly been involved with combat against us. Friedersdorf continues: Take Pakistan, where the CIA kills some people without even knowing their identities. ``As Obama nears the end of his term, officials said the kill list in Pakistan has slipped to fewer than 10 al-Qaeda targets, down from as many as two dozen. . . . '' Yet we are killing hundreds of people in Pakistan. There is a quote that I think sort of brings this and makes this very poignant. There is a quote from an ex-CIA agent--I think it is Bruce Riedel--who says: The drone strike program is sort of like a lawnmower. You can keep mowing them down, but as soon as the lawnmower stops, the grass grows again. Some people have gone one step further and said: For every 1 you kill or for maybe every 1 you accidentally kill whom you did not intend to kill, 10 more spring up. Think about it. If it were your family member and they have been killed and they were innocent or you believe them to be innocent, is it going to make you more or less likely to become involved with attacking the United States? I have written a couple letters to John Brennan, who has been put up for the CIA nomination. I think it looks like the first letter was sent January 25. So here we are into March, and I only got a response when he was threatened. So here is a guy whom the President promotes as being transparent and wanting to give a lot of information to the American people, he will not respond to a Senator. They treat the Senate with disdain, basically--will not even respond to us, much less the American people, when I asked him these questions. He finally responded only when his nomination was threatened. So when it came to the committee and it appeared as if I had bipartisan support for slowing down his nomination if he did not answer his questions, then he answered his questions. It does not give me a lot of confidence that in the future, going forward, if he is approved, that he is going to be real forthcoming and real transparent about this. I do not have a lot of anticipation or belief that we are going to get more information after this nomination hearing. Some are now saying: You have gotten your pound of flesh. Let him go, and we will keep working on this. The problem is, once he is gone, the discussion is over. Others in my party have been trying to get information about what went horribly wrong in Benghazi and have gotten some of that information but only by using it as leverage to try to get the President to do what is the honorable thing; that is, to be more transparent with his ways. In the first letter I sent to Brennan, I asked him the question: Is it legal to order the killing of American citizens and that you would not be compelled to even give your reasoning--not even specific to the case but any of your reasoning? Finally, as these questions came forward, some of the things were leaked out. One of the most troubling things that came out is when Brennan and the President finally began to talk about the drone strike program, which, according to the former Press Secretary, they were to deny that it existed for years. When they finally came out, they told us a couple things about their interpretation of it. One, they have no geographical limit to their drone strikes. The second thing is they told us what they thought was imminent. This is pretty important because a lot of Americans, myself included, believe if we are being attacked, we can respond with lethal force. But a lot of Americans think that we have to actually be engaged in that to respond with lethal force. But they told us the way their lawyers interpret ``imminent'' is imminent does not have to mean ``immediate.'' Only a bunch of lawyers could get together, government lawyers could get together and say imminent is not immediate. You have to understand, and what we should be asking the President is, Is this your standard for America? If you are going to assert that you have the right to kill Americans on American soil, are you going to assert--are you going to assert--that your standard is that an imminent threat does not have to be immediate? I am quite concerned, when I hear this kind of evasiveness, with this sort of nonresponse to questions. We also asked: Would it not be appropriate to require a judge or a court to review this? See, here is the real interesting thing. We had a President who ran for office saying your phone should not be tapped without a warrant. I happen to agree with Candidate Obama. But what happened to Candidate Obama, who wanted to protect your right to the privacy of your phone, who does not care much about your right not to be killed by a drone without any kind of judicial proceeding? I think we should demand it. The way things work around here, though, is people kind of say: Yes, we will demand it, and maybe later on this year we will talk about a bill or talk about getting something. What they should do is just say: No more. We are not going to move forward until we get some justice. We are not going to let the President--any President, Republican or Democratic--do this. One of the other questions I asked the President was: It is paradoxical that the Federal Government would need to go before a judge to authorize a wiretap on U.S. citizens even overseas but possibly not have any kind of oversight of killing an American here in America. We have asked him how many citizens have been killed. We have not gotten an answer to that. They say not many, and hopefully it has not been many. But I think it is important to know. I think it would be important to know, if we are going to target Americans in America, if that list exists. I think it would be important to know if being close to someone is also justified. What if you just happen to live in the neighborhood of somebody who is a suspected terrorist? Is it OK because you were close to them? What if you happen to go to dinner with a guy you did not know or a woman you did not know and the government says they are a terrorist? Just because you are having dinner with them and you are a male between the ages of 16 and 50, does that make you a combatant? We also asked the question: Do you condone the CIA's practice of counting civilians killed by U.S. drone strikes as militants simply because they are of the same age? Similar to every other question, no answer. We asked him whether al-Awlaki's son was a target. No answer. We asked how many people have been targeted? No answer. Part of the problem with this is that we are--or Congress in general is sloppy about writing legislation in general. I will give an example. When the ObamaCare legislation was written-- it is over 2,000 pages--but it leaves up to the Secretary of Health, I think 1,800 times, the power to decide at a later date what the rule would be. So since ObamaCare, of 2,000 pages, has been written, there have been now 9,000 pages of regulations. Dodd-Frank is kind of the same way. Dodd-Frank is a couple thousand pages. It now is going to wind up with 8,000 or 9,000 pages of regulations. We abdicate our responsibility by not writing legislation. We write shells of legislation that are imprecise and do not retain the power. Because of that, the executive branch and the bureaucracy, which is essentially the same thing, do whatever they want. This happened also with the authorization of use of force in Afghanistan. This happened over 10 years ago now--12 years ago. I thought we were going to war against the people who attacked us, and I am all for that. I would have voted for the war. I would have preferred it to have been a declaration of war. I think we were united in saying: Let's get those people who attacked us on 9/11 and make sure it never happens again. The problem is, as this war has drug on, they take that authorization of use of force to mean pretty much anything. They have now said the war has no geographic limitations. So it is not a war in Afghanistan; it is a war in Yemen, Somalia, Mali. It is a war in unlimited places. Were we a body that cared about our prerogative to declare war, we would take that power back. But I will tell you how poor--and this is on both sides of the aisle--how poor is our understanding or belief in retaining that power here. About 1 year ago, I tried to end the Iraq war. You may say: I thought the Iraq war was already over. It is. But we still have an authorization of use of force that says we can go to war in Iraq anytime. Since they think the use of force in Afghanistan means limitless war anywhere, anytime in the whole world, for goodness' sake, wouldn't we try to take back an authorization of force if the war is over? But here is the sad part. I actually got a vote on it. I think I got less than 20 votes. You cannot end a war after it is over up here. It has repercussions, because these authorizations to use force are used for many other things. So the authorization of force says you can go after al-Qaida or associated terrorists. The problem is that when you allow the executive branch to sort of determine what is al-Qaida, you have got no idea. For the most part I will not be able to determine that either. All the information is classified. There are a lot of bad people. There is a war going on in Yemen. I do not know how much it has to do with us, you know, or how much there is an al-Qaida presence there trying to organize to come and attack us. Maybe there is. But maybe those are also people who are just fighting their local government. How about Mali? I am not sure. In Mali, they are probably worried more about trying to get the next day's food than coming over here to attack us. But we have to ask these questions. We have to ask about limitations on force, because essentially what we have now is a war without the geographic boundaries. We have many on my side who come down here and say, the battlefield is here in America. Be worried. Be alarmed. Alarm bells should go off when people tell you that the battlefield is in America. Why? Because when the battlefield is in America, we do not have due process. What they are talking about is they want the laws of war. Another way of putting that is, they call it the laws of war. Another way to put it is to call it martial law. That is what they want in the United States when they say the battlefield is here. One of them, in fact, said, if they ask for a lawyer, you tell them to shut up. Well, if that is the standard we are going to have in America, I am quite concerned that the battlefield will be here and that the Constitution would not apply. Because to tell you the truth, if you are shooting at us in Afghanistan, the Constitution does not apply over there. But I certainly want it to apply here. If you are engaged in combat overseas, you do not get due process. But when people say, oh, the battlefield has come to America, and the battlefield is everywhere, the war is limitless in time and scope, be worried because your rights will not exist if you call America a battlefield for all time. We have asked him whether the strikes are exclusively focused on al- Qaida and what is the definition of being part of al-Qaida. In 1947, the National Security Act was passed. It said the CIA does not operate in America. Most people--most laypeople know that. The CIA is supposed to be doing surveillance and otherwise outside the United States of foreign threats. The FBI works within the United States. They do some of the same thing. But they are different groups. The CIA operating in Iraq or Afghanistan does not get a warrant before they do whatever they do to snoop on our enemies. The FBI in our country does. They operate under different rules, and for a reason. We do not want them to operate in the United States. We are not saying the CIA are bad people, we just do not want them operating with no rules or the rules we allow them to operate with overseas. We do not want them operating in our country. The disappointing thing is that a month ago when I asked John Brennan this question, as his nomination came forward, I could not get an answer. He would not answer the question about the CIA operating in the United States. Only after yanking his chain, browbeating him in committee, threatening not to let him out of committee does he finally say he is going to obey the law. We should be alarmed by that. Alarm bells should go off when we find that what is going on here is it takes that much for him to say he is going to obey the law. The President has said: Don't worry, because he is not going to kill you with a drone unless it is infeasible to catch you. Now that sounds kind of comforting. But I guess if our standard for whether we kill you is whether it is practical, that does bother me a little bit. It does not sound quite strict enough. I am kind of worried that maybe there is a sequester and the President says we cannot have tours in the White House. Maybe he has not got enough people to go arrest you. He had policemen by him. He is saying he is going to lay off the policemen. Of course, he does not have anything to do with the policemen, so do not worry about that. But he had the policemen by him that he is going to lay off, so maybe it is infeasible because he has laid off the policemen so it is going to be easier to kill you. I know that sounds as though we have gone a slippery slope beyond what he is asking for. But if his standard is it is infeasible to capture you and that is what you are hanging your hat on, I would be a little concerned that that may not be enough protection for Americans on American soil. There is a law called posse comitatus. It has been on the books since shortly after the Civil War. It is once again one of those things a lot of people do not think about, but it is an important thing. It says the military does not operate on U.S. soil unless there is a declaration of an insurrection or a civil war. There has to be a process that Congress goes through. We have had this law for a long time. Once again, the reason we do it is not because we think our military are bad people. I am proud of our soldiers. I am proud of our Army. I am proud of what they do for our country. But they operate under different rules. It is a much more dangerous environment they operate under. It is different. It is still dangerous in America, but policemen have different rules of engagement than your soldiers have. There are more restrictions and restraint on what we do in our country. So that is why we say the military cannot operate here. So when we asked the President, can you kill Americans on American soil with your drone strikes, which is part of the military, it should be an easy answer. In fact, I hope someone is calling him now and asking him for an answer. It would save me a lot of time and breath. My throat is already dry and I just got started. But if they would ask him for an answer: Can the military operate in the United States? Well, no, the law says the military cannot operate in the United States. It is on the books. He should simply do the honorable thing and say he will obey the law. It is simple. But I do not get why they refuse to answer it. It worries me that they refuse to answer the question. Because by refusing to answer it, I believe they believe they have expansive power, unlimited power. The real irony of this is is that many on the left, Senator Barack Obama included, were very critical of the Bush administration. They felt as though the Bush administration usurped power. They felt the Bush administration argued invalid aggrandizement or grasping for power. John Yoo was one of the architects of this, believing basically that the President just says, hey, I am going to protect you, I can do whatever the hell I want. Many on the left objected to that. Some of us on the right also objected to this usurpation of power by the Republican President. But the thing is, now that the shoe is on the other foot, we are not seeing any of that. We are now seeing a President who was worried about wiretaps not at all worried about the legality of killing Americans on American soil with no judicial process. But the law of posse comitatus prevents this from happening. It is very clear. It has been on the books for 150-some-odd years. I think it would be pretty easy for the President to go ahead and say that he will obey the law. We asked Brennan the question on this and we got no answer. The answers we have gotten are almost more disturbing than getting an answer, really, to tell you the truth. Because when the President responds that I have not killed any Americans yet at home, and that I do not intend do so, but I might, it is incredibly alarming and goes against his oath of office. He says in his oath of office that I will preserve, I will protect, and I will defend the Constitution. It does not say I intend to or that I might. Can you imagine the furor if people were talking about the second amendment? Can you imagine what conservatives would say if the President said, well, you know, I kind of like the second amendment and I intend to, when convenient, when it is feasible, protect the second amendment? Or what about those who believe in the first amendment, if the President were to say, I have not broken the first amendment yet, I intend to follow it, but I might break it, or I intend to follow it when it is feasible? So I have all of those rules, and this is what the President answered when he was at Google Campus a couple of weeks ago. They asked him the question: Can you kill Americans on American soil? He said: Well, the rules will probably be different outside the United States than inside. That basically means, yes, he thinks he can kill Americans on American soil, but he is going to have some rules. Do not worry about it, because he will make some rules and there will be a process, but it will not be due process. It will be a process that he sets up in secret in the White House, and I do not find that acceptable. The only answer really acceptable, you know, we ask a question that could be yes or no: Can you kill an American on American soil? It is a yes-or-no question. They have been very evasive. They have never really answered the question. But when asked it, we pretty much knew only one answer was acceptable. That answer is no. I mean, if you do not answer it, basically by not answering it you are saying yes. I was actually a little bit startled when I finally got the answer: Yes, we can kill Americans on American soil. I thought for sure that they would be evasive to the end, try to get their nominee through without opening Pandora's box. But they have opened Pandora's box. It would be a mistake for us to ignore it. It would be a mistake for us to ignore the ramifications of what they have done. When we separate out police power from judicial power, it is an important separation. You know, the police can arrest you. They are allowed to do certain things. But the policeman that comes to our door and puts handcuffs on you does not decide your guilt. Sometimes we do not always think about how important the separation is. But it is incredibly important that those who arrest you are not the ones who ultimately accuse you. The court, through the people, accuses you, and then you are given a trial to determine your guilt. It is complicated. It is not always clear who is innocent and who is guilty. Judges and juries make mistakes. But at least we have a process. You get appeals most of the time. We have a significant process going on that has a several-hundred-year tradition at the least. So what gets me about the process that the President favors is, it is the ``trust me'' process. You know, I have no intention of doing bad things. I will do good things. I am a good person. I am not disputing his motives or saying he is not a good person. But I am disputing someone who is naive enough to think that is good enough for our Republic, that his good intentions are good enough for our Republic. It never would have been accepted. It would have been laughed out of the Constitutional Convention. The Founding Fathers would have objected so strenuously that that person would probably never have been elected to office in our country. Someone who does not believe that the rules have to be in place, and that we cannot have our rights guaranteed by the intentions of our politicians--think about it. Congress has about a 10-percent approval rating. Think the American people want to face whether they are going to be killed by a drone on a politician? I certainly do not. It does not have anything to do with whether he is a Republican or Democrat. I would be here today if this were a Republican President, because you cannot give that much power to one person. We separated the police power from the adjudication or from the jury power from the decisions on innocence and guilt. It is separate from the police power, purposefully so, with great forethought. Some transform this--and the President has tried--Brennan has tried to transform this into: Oh, well, we need to reserve this power for when planes are attacking the Twin Towers. Well, that is not what we are talking about, Mr. President. I think you misunderstand or you purposefully obfuscate or you purposefully mislead. No one is questioning whether the United States can repel an attack. No one is questioning whether your local police can repel an attack. Anybody involved in lethal force, the legal doctrine in our country, and has been historically, has always been, that the government can repel lethal attacks. The problem is that the drone strike program is often not about combatants. It is about people who may or may not be conspiring but they are not in combat. They are in a car. They are in their house. They are in a restaurant. They are in a cafe. If we are going to bring that standard to America, what I am doing down here today is asking the President to be explicit. If you are going to have the standard that you are going to kill noncombatants in America, come forward and please say it clearly so we know what we are up against. If you are not going to do it, come up with what the easy answer is: I am not going to kill noncombatants. That would have been easy for him to say. He could have said the military at some point in time needs to repel invasions. We know that. We are not questioning that. We are questioning a drone strike program--we don't know, because nobody will tell us the numbers. The numbers are secret. One Senator said in a public meeting that 4,700 people had been killed overseas. If I had to venture a guess, a significant amount of them weren't involved in shooting at American soldiers. If they were, by all means kill them. If we are fighting a war in Afghanistan--which we have been--and if there are soldiers around the bend who are a threat to our soldiers, there is no due process at that point. This is not what we are arguing about. We are arguing about targeted strikes of people not involved in combat. That is my concern. My concern also is who is and what is a terrorist, who is associated with terrorism. The government has put out many documents now which tell you if you see something, say something. The documents you see, I am not so sure these people are terrorists. If you see somebody paying in cash or if you have a store, such as one of your customers comes in frequently and they pay in cash, should you report them to the government? I can't imagine that is the kind of standard we are going to have in our country for deciding drone strikes. When it comes to some of these people, though, I think some of the drone strikes have probably been justified. Al-Awlaki, I think, was a traitor. This is not from looking at classified documents, this is from reading the lay press. By all means, he gave up on his country, renounced his citizenship, went overseas, consorted with and aided the enemy. One of the interesting questions about aiding the enemy is what exactly that means and what are the standards to be. Kevin Williamson writes for the National Review. He wrote an article on drones that I think truly brings this home if you are going to talk about and want to know who are the people who potentially could be killed. In some ways al-Awlaki was a sympathizer, someone who aided and abetted through Internet talk and chatter. That was the main thing he was accused of. Actually, after the fact, they said he had more direct association. I don't know if that is true. I haven't seen the secret information on that. What I would say is he was initially brought up as a sympathizer. Here is the problem. Many writers have said if you take up arms against your country, you are an enemy combatant. I think that is true. If you are in Afghanistan, have a grenade launcher on your shoulder and are shooting at Americans, you are an enemy combatant. You don't get due process. Here is the question: If you are in Poughkeepsie and you are on the Internet, and you say I sympathize with some group around the world that doesn't like America, and say bad things about America, are you a traitor? I mean, you can try someone for treason for that. I am not sure if it will rise up to that if you are politically opposed to what your government is doing in favor of another. Kevin Williamson gets it pretty clearly: If sympathizing with our enemies and propagandizing on their behalf is the equivalent of making war on the country, then the Johnson and Nixon administrations should have bombed every elite college in America. During the 1960s, that is all that came out was anti-America, antiwar. Is objecting to your government or objecting to the policy of your government sympathizing with the enemy? Some were openly sympathetic. No one will ever forget Jane Fonda swiveling around in North Vietnamese armored guns, and it was despicable. It is one thing if you want to try her for treason, but are you going to drop a drone Hellfire missile on Jane Fonda? Are you going to drop a drone Hellfire missile on those at Kent State? Our country objected to what happened at Kent State, which was not good--but it was accidental since they were shooting over the heads of these people. Can you imagine we have gone from a country that was rightfully upset about the deaths at Kent State to a country which now is going to say, if you are in college and you are rabble rousing because you don't like the government's foreign policy or the government's war actions, you are sympathizing? There are a lot of questions that aren't being asked, because sympathizing appears to be used as a standard for the drone strike program. We actually had students, apparently during the Vietnam war, who were actually raising funds for the Vietcong. That does to me sound like treason. It sounds to me something like we are fighting an enemy and you are giving comfort to the enemy. That does sound like treason. I have no problem with some people actually being tried for treason, but they get a day in court. They don't get a Hellfire missile sent to their house. There is a difference, though, between sympathizing and taking up arms. Most people around here who want to justify no rules, America is a battlefield, no limits to war--they really want to blur it all together. It is easier to say, oh, you don't want to stop anybody who is shooting at Americans, but it is not true. I think lethal force may be used against those engaged in lethal force. What troubles me about the drone strike program is quite a few--I don't know the number--the Wall Street Journal says the bulk of the attacks in Afghanistan has been signature attacks. This means nobody was named, nobody specifically was identified, and civilians aren't really counted. This is because anybody, any male between the age of 16 and 60, is a combatant unless otherwise proven. If those are the standards, I think we need to be alarmed. I think there is a difference between sympathizing and taking up arms. One of the interesting things Kevin Williamson and the National Review brings out, and it is sort of a conundrum for conservatives-- because saying someone was involved and just taking the government's words, like saying al-Awlaki was involved with these other people and taking the government's word, we have no way of ascertaining or questioning whether the secret information is true or not true. A few years before this--and a lot of people don't remember this--al-Awlaki, who was killed a couple years before this, was brought to the Pentagon to speak as a part of a group of moderate Islamic preachers. They thought him to be an Islamic voice of reason. He even came to the Capitol and said prayers in the Capitol. This is the guy who the government said was a good guy for a while and later said he was a bad guy. I think ultimately the evidence he was a bad guy is pretty strong. Most of his crime was sympathizing. It wasn't enough of a standard. I think in a court, in a treasonous court, al-Awlaki would have been convicted of treason if I were a juror. I would have voted he was committing treason, and I wouldn't have had trouble at all with a drone strike on him. If we are going to take by extension the standard we used in putting him on the list that he was a sympathizer, agitator, and a pain in the royal you-know-what on the Internet, there are a lot of those people in America if that is going to be our standard. That is why I would feel a little more comforted if it weren't an accusation by a politician who unleashes Hellfire missiles. I would be a little more comforted--and I think we would all sleep a little better in our houses at night--if we knew that before the Hellfire missile comes down, a policeman would come to your door and say we accuse you of this. They might put handcuffs on you and take you to jail, but they don't get to summarily execute you. That is all I am asking. I am asking for the President to admit publicly he is not in favor of summary executions. That is really all I am asking, about summary executions of noncombatants. It seems like a pretty easy answer. We could be done with this in a moment's notice if someone will call the President and ask the question. We could be done with this because that is what I want to hear, not that he is going to use the military to repel an invasion. Nobody is questioning the authority of the President to repel an invasion. I am questioning the authority of the President to kill noncombatants asleep at home, eating in the restaurant, or what-have-you. One of the things Williamson brings up in his National Review article again--which is a little bit off the subject but somewhat related--we were fearful and we didn't do a very good job with 9/11, frankly. September 11 occurred because of a lot of mistakes, and some of you could look back as a Monday-morning quarterback and say, oh, we should have done this. One of the things that sort of bothered me about 9/11 was no one was ever fired. In fact, they gave medals--the head of the FBI, the CIA, everybody gets a medal. No one was ever fired. Some of you may remember there was a 20th hijacker. His name was Moussaoui. He was in Minnesota, and they captured him a month in advance of 9/11. When they captured him, the FBI agent there--who was spot on--was doing an excellent job. The agent who should have received the medal was the FBI agent who caught Moussaoui and was asking his superiors to get a warrant. He asked repeatedly. He sent 70 letters to headquarters, saying: May I have a warrant to open this guy's computer, to investigate him? He was turned down. He got no response. It was a horrible and tragic human error. What do we do? We promote and give medals to the people who were in charge. That agent should have received a medal, but anybody above him who made the decision not to even ask for a warrant shouldn't have gone anywhere within the department. Williamson makes the point if our law enforcement and intelligence agencies--particularly the State Department--had been doing a minimally competent job vis-a-vis visa overstays and application screenings, at least 15 of the 9/11 hijackers would have been caught. They were all on student visas, and they were all overstaying their student visas. Nobody was paying attention. I still ask that question today. I ask, do we know where all the students are, particularly from about 10 Middle Eastern countries? The students who aren't from our own country, do we know where they are? I think we have not a good enough system to know where they all are, whether they have come and gone. This is a real problem. Had we actually looked at Moussaoui's computer? They did; they looked at it on September 12. The day after 9/11 they looked at his computer. I think it, within hours, led them and linked them up to several hijackers in Florida and ultimately would have perhaps exposed the whole ring. The same thing was going on in Arizona at the same time. They had somebody in Arizona saying there are guys who want to fly planes and don't want to learn how to land them. There were horrible and tragic occurrences that happened, human breakdown. How do we fix it? We fix it the same way we do everything in Washington: We threw a ton of money at it, and I mean a ton of money. Billions upon billions and into the trillions of dollars have now been spent. Really the main problem with 9/11 was a lack of communication, lack of trying, lack of doing a good job at what you were already supposed to be doing. When we look at this issue, and as we go forward from here, I think what is most important to me is we not let this go. This is the first time I have decided to come to the floor and speak in a true filibuster. People talk about filibuster all the time. They say the filibuster is overused and it is abused. A lot of times the filibuster in our country and in the Senate is actually requesting 60 votes happen and we need to do everything by unanimous consent, so it almost never happens. I have been here 2 years, and I don't think I have ever seen anybody come to the floor and speak in a filibuster as I am doing today. I think it is important, though, and I think the issue rises to such an occasion. There are a lot of things we disagree on, Republicans and Democrats. I think there are a lot of things we could actually pass up here, a lot of things we could actually agree to we could pass if we get together, try to do smaller bills, work on what we agreed and get away from some of the empty partisanship. The reason I came to the floor today to do this is because I think certain things rise above party politics. Certain things rise above partisanship. I think you are right to be secure in your person, the right to be secure in your liberty, the right to be tried by a jury of your peers. These are things that are so important and rise to such a level we shouldn't give up on them easily. I don't see this battle as a partisan battle at all. I don't see this as Republicans versus Democrats. I would be here if there were a Republican President doing this. Really, the great irony of this is President Obama's position on this is an extension of George Bush's opinion. It basically is a continuation and an expansion of George Bush's opinion. George Bush was a President who believed in very expansive powers, some would say unlimited. He was accused of running an imperial Presidency. The irony is this President we have currently was elected in opposition to that. This President was one elected who, when he was in this body, was often very vocal at saying the President's powers were limited. When I first came here, one of the first votes I was able to receive was a vote on whether we should go to war without congressional approval. The interesting part is that the war was beginning in Libya. It turned out to be a small war, but small wars sometimes lead to big wars. In fact, that was one of Eisenhower's admonitions, to beware of small wars, that you may find yourself in a big war. Fortunately, the Libya war didn't turn out to be a big war, although I think it is still a huge mess and it is still yet to be determined whether Libya will descend into the chaos of radical Islam. I think there is a chance they may still descend into that chaos. But when the question came up about going to war in Libya, there was the question of, well, doesn't the Constitution say you have to declare war? And so we looked back through some of the President's writings as a candidate, and one of the President's writings I found very instructive and I was quite proud of him for having said it. The President said that no President shall unilaterally go to war without the authority of Congress unless there is an imminent threat to the country. I guess we should be a little wary of his ``unless'' now, since we know imminent doesn't have to be immediate and imminent no longer means what humans once thought imminent meant. But Candidate Obama did say that the President doesn't go to war by himself. I think it would be fair to say that Candidate Obama also felt the President didn't have the authority to imprison you indefinitely without a trial. And I think it is also safe to say that Barack Obama of 2007 would be right down here with me arguing against this drone strike program if he were in the Senate. It amazes and disappoints me how much he has actually changed from what he once stood for. But I forced a vote on his words. I took his exact words. We quoted him and put those words up on a standard next to me, and we voted on a sense-of-the-Senate that said: No President shall go to war without the authority of Congress--which basically just restates the Constitution. Now, you would think that would be a pretty easy vote for people. I think I got less than 20 votes. That is the sad state of affairs we are in. There were some who actually probably believed that but refused to vote for it because they said: Well, he is a Republican, and I won't vote with a Republican. But I honestly tell you, were the shoe on the other foot, were there a Republican President here and I a Republican Senator, I would have exactly the same opinion. My opinion today on drone strikes would be exactly the same opinion under George Bush. And I was critical of George Bush as well. Were there a Republican President now, I would have the same instinct and the same resolution to carry this forward. And on the issue of war, it is the same no matter which President. One of the complaints you hear a lot of times in the media is about there being no bipartisanship in Congress. Well, the interesting thing is, actually, there is a lot of bipartisanship in Congress. If you look at people who don't really believe in much restraint of government as far as civil liberties, it really is on both sides. So you will find that often on these votes on whether the Constitution says we have to declare war in the Congress, Republicans and Democrats vote overwhelmingly against that. Now, you need to realize the implications of that. What they are voting for is to say we don't retain that power and we don't want it. The Constitution gave it to us, but we are giving it back. And this has been going on for a long time, really, probably for over 100 years, starting with Woodrow Wilson, who sort of grabbed for Presidential power, and Presidents have been getting more and more powerful for over 100 years, Republican and Democratic. There was at one time--point in time in our history a pride among the Senate and a pride among the Congress that said: These are our powers, and we are not giving them up. There were people on both sides of the aisle who would stand firm and say: This is not a power I am willing to relinquish; this is not something that is good for the country. And by relinquishing the power of Congress, we relinquish something very fundamental to our Republic, which is the checks and balances that we should have--checks and balances to prevent one body or one part of the three parts of government from obtaining too much power. So there was a time when we tried to keep that power. Unfortunately, the bipartisanship we have now, many in the media fail to understand. They see us not getting along on taxes and on spending, but they fail to understand that on something very important--on whether an individual has a right to a trial by jury, whether an individual has the right to not be detained indefinitely--there is quite a bit of bipartisanship, although usually in the wrong direction. Now, I will say there is some evolution and some trend toward people being more respectful of this, and there has been some work on both sides of the aisle that has brought together some of us who believe in civil liberties. There was a bill last year called the national defense authorization bill. In that bill, there was a clause that said Americans can be indefinitely detained. What does that mean? Well, it means forever, basically, or without a trial, no sort of sentence, no sort of adjudication of guilt or innocence, an American citizen can be held. So there was another Republican Senator on the floor, and I asked the question: Does that mean an American could actually be sent to Guantanamo Bay from here, someone who is accused of something but never gets a trial? And his answer was yes. His answer was yes, if they are a danger to the country. The problem with that kind of thinking is, who gets to determine whether you are a danger? Who gets to determine whether you are guilty or innocent? It sort of begs the question of what our court system is set up to do, which is to try to find guilt or innocence. Guilt or innocence isn't always apparent, and sometimes an accusation is a false accusation. Sometimes accusations are made because people politically don't like your point of view. So the question becomes, should we have a process where we try to determine innocence or guilt? So in the national defense authorization bill, there was an amendment that said you can be indefinitely detained, an American could be sent to Guantanamo Bay, and we had a big fight over it. We lost the first time around in 2012. We had an amendment that tried to protect American citizens. This was a good example of bipartisanship on our side. We had 45 votes, and I would say it was probably about 38 Democrats and about 7 Republicans. So that was an example of both sides kind of working together. But we fought and we lost. The next year, we came back and we fought for the same amendment again and we beat them. Interestingly, we beat them. We had 67 votes to say that you cannot detain an American. An American can't be sent to Guantanamo Bay without a trial, without an accusation, without a jury, without the Bill of Rights. You can't do that to Americans. We won the battle with 67 votes. So the bill passes, the House passes their version without our amendment in it, it goes to the conference committee, where they work out the differences, and they strip out our language. So sometimes when you win around here, you lose. But with the 67, there was a pretty good mix--maybe 35, 40 Democrats and 15, 20 Republicans. So there is some emerging consensus or some kind of emerging group. One of the other Senators has called it the checks and balances caucus, and I think that is a very accurate term because that is part of what we are arguing for. We are arguing that no one person should get too much power or no one body will get too much power. Some people see all that fighting and disputing between the different branches of government, and they see it in a bad light. They say: Oh, with all that fighting and bickering, that is gridlock. But in some ways, our Founding Fathers weren't too opposed to a little gridlock, particularly if it were gridlock that said: You know what, we are not going to make it easy to get rid of the first amendment. It is not easy to get a constitutional amendment in our country. We have added some through the years, but it is not easy to do. We make it hard to amend the Constitution. In fact, we make it such that we are not really a country that is majority rule. And I am sort of a stickler for talking about the differences between a democracy and a republic. I think some people are sloppy with their words and they love the idea that America is a democracy. Woodrow Wilson said we were going to war in the world war to make the world safe for democracy. Well, No. 1, we are not a democracy, and we were never intended to be a democracy. When Franklin came out of the Constitutional Convention, a woman went up to him and asked him: What will it be? Will it be a monarchy or a democracy? And he said: It is a republic. It is a constitutional republic, if you can keep it. He was already worrying about whether democratic action would lead to people straying away and giving a government too many powers. So we are a republic, and it is important to know the differences between a republic and a democracy, particularly with our history and our country. In our country, we had a period of time where majorities passed some very egregious and unfair and unjust laws. These were called the Jim Crow laws. They passed laws based on race or the color of your skin, and these were passed by majorities. The important thing about the Constitution and about rights and one of the reasons I am here today talking about the fifth amendment and how it gives you the right not to be committed to prison or be killed without due process is that our Founders thought it was very important, this whole concept between a republic and a democracy, and also considering the idea that majority State legislatures were voting on things such as the Jim Crow laws that would say that a White person can't sell a house to a Black person or vice versa. Those laws were passed by majority rule. So any time someone comes up to me and says they want a democracy, this is my first question to them: You are OK with Jim Crow, then? Because democracies did bad things. But if you believe that rights are protected and that rights should be protected and that these individual rights are not something a democracy can overturn, then you do truly believe in a protection that is more important than any democratic rule. There has been some dispute over this. There was a Supreme Court case by the name of Lochner back in 1905. The President doesn't like Lochner at all. He is very much opposed to it. But the one thing about Lochner I like is that Lochner really expands the 14th amendment. The 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments were passed after the Civil War and usually over Democratic objection. In my State, the Democrats ruled the State legislature in Kentucky for many, many years, and they voted against the 13th amendment, the 14th amendment, and the 15th amendment. The great champions of emancipation, of voting rights, of all of the postwar amendments were the Republicans. Every African American in the country was a Republican before 1930-- virtually every African American. In 1931, in Louisville, there were 25,730 Black Republicans, and there were 129 Black Democrats. Every African American was a Republican at one point in time. I try to tell people, even though the numbers have been, unfortunately, reversed, we are the party that believes in the immutability of rights. We don't believe that the democracy can take away your rights, that a majority rule can take away your first, your second, or your fourth amendment rights. And I think if we got that message out, we might change some of what is going on. But the President is an opponent of the Lochner decision. In the Lochner decision, a State legislature decides something, and it is not really of importance what the decision is so much as that it is about judicial deference, about whether the courts should say: Well, the State legislature decided this, and majorities should get to rule. Many believed as Oliver Wendell Holmes did, who was a dissenter in the Lochner case. He basically said majorities should get to rule. Herbert Croly, one of the founders of the New Republic, wrote that we can get trapped up in all of this support for Bill of Rights and all these ancient individual rights. If we get too carried away with this whole idea of rights thing, we will have a monarchy of the law instead of a monarchy of the people. It was for good reason that we established a republic and not a democracy. One of the best contrasts--it may not be a perfect contrast, but I think it has some truth and validity--is that our Revolution worked. In our Revolution we established a constrained government. In France, the mob came into power. They had mob rule. The French Revolution was a disaster. Now, we had some things going for us. We had a colonial government with English common law and adjudication, and we had adopted practices. We were Englishmen, and we believed in the rights of Englishmen. We had that for several hundred years in our country, so it was easier for us to have a revolution. They didn't quite have that going on in France, so it was different. But one of the differences I see between America and France is that we established a republic, and we weren't going to have majority rule where the majority was setting up a guillotine. Ours wasn't perfect, obviously. The Founders left and allowed slavery to still occur. Interestingly, though, if you read the Constitution, I think they were embarrassed by it. The word ``slave'' doesn't occur in our Constitution. In fact, there were many abolitionist writers, one by the name of Lysander Spooner, who actually wrote about the unconstitutionality of slavery even before the war. And if you read the Constitution and acknowledge that there is no word in there for ``slavery'' and nothing that says you have to be consigned to slavery-- there are things in there that say you can't be kept without being presented with charges. ``Habeas corpus'' means ``present the body.'' In the old days in England and in different monarchies, they just snatched you up. If you were next in line to be King or you made them mad, they snatched you up and put you into the tower. So we came up with the right of habeas corpus. You had to present the body and say: He has been arrested, and these are the charges against him. We have gotten to where there is some concern in our country about that, but we have had that right all along. So Lysander Spooner wrote and said: Why shouldn't a slave come forward and say, this guy is keeping me; he is telling me I have to work for him, but I haven't been charged with anything. What is my crime? Eventually, one court case did come forward, and it was ruled incorrectly. I am not sure exactly how the arguments were, but in Dred Scott they ruled that you can't make the argument. I don't know if habeas corpus was part of that case, but it should have been. What I am trying to say, though, is that the rights of the Constitution--the rights of the individual that were enshrined in the Constitution--are important things that democracies can't overturn. When you get to the Lochner case, which was in 1905, the majority ruled five to four that the right to make a contract is part of your due process. Someone can't deprive you of determining how long your working hours are without due process. President Obama is a big opponent to this. But I would ask him--among the other things I am asking him today--to rethink the Lochner case because the Lochner case really is what precedes and what the case Buchanan v. Warley is predicated on. Buchanan v. Warley is a case from 1917--interestingly, it comes from my State, Louisville, KY. There was a young African-American attorney by the name of William Warley. He was a Republican, like most African Americans were in Louisville in those days. He was a founder of the NAACP and, like most founders of the NAACP, a Republican. What they did in 1914 was they sued because the Kentucky Legislature--by a majority rule, by democratic action--passed a law that said a White person couldn't sell to a Black person in a White section of town or vice versa. This was the first case the NAACP brought up. Moorfield Storey was the first president of the NAACP, a famous attorney. He and an attorney by the name of Clayton Blakely went forward with this case, and they won the case. It actually passed overwhelmingly. But, interestingly, this case to end Jim Crow was based on the Lochner decision. So those who don't like the Lochner decision, I would say go back. We need to reassess Lochner. In fact, there is a good book by Bernstein from George Mason talking about rehabilitating Lochner. The thing is, with majority rule--if you say we are going to give deference to majority rule or we are going to have judicial restraint and we are going to say that whatever the majority wants is fine, you set yourself up for a diminishment of rights. I go back to the discussion of the Constitution limits power that is given to Congress, but it doesn't limit rights. The powers are enumerated; your rights are unenumerated. The powers given to the government are few and defined; the freedoms left to you are many and undefined. And that is important. What does this have to do with Lochner? The case in Lochner is whether a majority rule--a State legislature--can take away your due process, your due process to contract. Can they take away your life and liberty without due process? And the Court ruled no. I think it is a wonderful decision. It expands the 14th amendment and says to the people that you have unenumerated rights. Now, there is some dissension on how we look at these cases. But when you go forward to Buchanan v. Warley, the case about Jim Crow laws and housing segregation, one of the people who was going to dissent--and I think he thought better of it when he thought about that he would be the first Justice in probably 70-some-odd years to say that he believed in the Jim Crow laws and was upholding the Jim Crow laws--was Oliver Wendell Holmes. He actually writes an opinion that has been found but was never presented to the Court, and he ended up voting to get rid of the Jim Crow laws, but he actually wrote an opinion in favor because he believed so strongly in majority rule. Some may think these are idle questions. I don't think it is an idle question whether or not you have a democracy or a republic. I think these questions--from Lochner, from Buchanan v. Warley, all the way through to the present--are important. In the last couple years, we had two cases on gun rights, the second amendment, called Heller and McDonald. I think both of them can be seen as, once again, an expansion of the 14th amendment to say: Your privileges and immunities which are part of the 14th amendment include the second amendment, and they include certain rights. In fact, I think any power or any right not given up to the government or limited by the enumerated powers is yours. So when they say the privileges and immunities of the 14th amendment, I believe that means everything else. What does that mean? It means I believe in a very circumscribed view for the government. One of the side benefits of having a circumscribed view of the government would be that a government that is not allowed to do much wouldn't get in many problems. For example, if your government wasn't allowed to spend money it didn't have or if your government wasn't allowed to spend money on programs that were not enumerated as being within the purview of the Federal Government, you wouldn't have these massive deficits. We would have never gotten in this fix if we believed in a republic and not a democracy. Now, what proof do I have that the current officials believe in democracy versus republic? When ObamaCare came forward, the comments from then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi were: A majority passed this. We passed this by majority. It is the law. Why would anybody question the constitutionality? The President said the same thing. The President said: A majority passed this. What right has the court to overturn this? The question has been written about by many brilliant scholars who have looked at the Constitution and looked at what it means. Some of this has to do with whether you presume liberty--and Randy Barnett has written about restoring the Constitution--whether you have a presumption of liberty or whether you have a presumption of constitutionality. That may sound a little esoteric, but what does that mean? It is whether or not, when they pass a law up here, you just presume it is fine because it is the law and the judges should give deference to it because it is a law. It may sound confusing because you might think I am arguing for judicial activism. In a way, I kind of am because if the Congress usurps the Constitution, if the Congress takes away from your rights, the judges should stop them in their tracks. I am not arguing for deference to the legislature; I am arguing for deference to the Constitution. I am also arguing that there is a presumption of liberty. This goes back to the way we want to look at the 14th amendment. The 14th amendment says we have unenumerated rights. I guess, by extension, when you go from the 14th amendment to the 9th and 10th amendments is the best way to look at this. The 14th amendment talks about privileges and immunities, and when you look at what the 9th and 10th amendment do, they say those freedoms you didn't relinquish or those powers you didn't give to the government are left to the States and the people respectively, and it says they are not to be disparaged. I always loved the way that was worded--not to be disparaged. Not only is the Federal Government not to trample on your rights, they are not to be disparaged. But these rights are unlimited. They are yours. You got them from your Creator. These are natural-born rights, and no democracy should be able to take these away from you. Now, by changing the Constitution, they could literally take away your freedom of speech or your freedom to practice your religion. I don't think I will see that ever happen, and it is difficult to change our Constitution, but it is incredibly important that our Founding Fathers put it in there and made it difficult. I always kind of joke that if you go to a conservative meeting and you talk about the second amendment, everybody pats you on the back and they all love you--until you get to the fourth amendment. But if we are going to have the second amendment, I think you have to have the fourth amendment--the right to be free in your person from unreasonable searches and seizures, that a judge should have to have a warrant to come in your house. How are your guns going to be protected if they can come in your house without a warrant? You have to have the fourth amendment. But you also have to have the fifth amendment. We don't talk about the fifth amendment very much. Everything is about the second amendment. It has been all over the news. You can't turn on a channel without hearing about the second amendment. But I think today is as good a day as any to talk about the fifth amendment. I have come here to filibuster the nomination of John Brennan because I think the fifth amendment is important. But I think we shouldn't be cavalier. I don't think we should be casual in our disregard for the Constitution. I think that to allow the President to trample on and shred the Constitution and say that the fifth amendment no longer applies is a travesty, and it is something we should not do lightly. So I think it is worth a discussion. So far, it is sort of a one-way discussion, but we will see. But it is worth a discussion that we talk about the fifth amendment. It says that no person shall be deprived of their life or their liberty. That is what it means. It is pretty clear, and it is pretty plain. You can't take away someone's life and liberty without due process or an indictment. So it should trouble every American. I can't imagine that there wouldn't be an American in our country who would not be troubled that we are talking about killing noncombatants in America with drone strikes. We have to get the President to respond to this. I don't think it is good enough for the President to say: I haven't done it yet. I don't intend to do it, but I might. His oath of office says he will preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. The oath of office doesn't say: Well, I intend to when it is convenient. I have never seen a President go out on the lawn with the Chief Justice and say: I intend to follow the Constitution when it is convenient. Because what he says is he won't drop a Hellfire missile on you unless it is infeasible to capture you. That is what they are doing overseas. If that is going to be the standard for America, if you are not going to get a Hellfire missile dropped on you unless it is infeasible--to me, that sounds like unless it is convenient; if it is inconvenient. ``Not feasible'' sounds like inconveniency is the standard. I asked Secretary Kerry about this in his nominating process. I said: Can you go to war without Congress approving of it, without a declaration of war, like the Constitution says? And he said: No. I intend to obey the Constitution--except for when I don't intend to obey the Constitution. It is hard to get things through Congress, and it is Congress's fault. There are too many squabbles and so many fights. So most of the time we will come to Congress and we will ask for a declaration of war--which, by the way, we have not done since World War I, and when we did, it was voted on nearly unanimously. But this is the standard we get to: We don't intend to kill anyone and we don't intend to go to war without a declaration of war unless it is impractical to get your approval. That was the point. If you do not get the point of the Constitution, if you don't get the point of what kind of system our government set up, what kind of system our Founders set up, it was to make it impractical. It was to make it difficult to go to war. It was to make it difficult and make it important: There would be debate and checks and balances. If inconveniency is our standard for going to war without Congress, inconveniency is our standard for killing Americans on American soil with drones, I think we have sunk to a new low. I just cannot imagine as a country that is the standard you want to have. I want to reiterate. This doesn't have anything to do with the President being a Democrat. Whether he was a Democrat or Republican, I don't question his motives. I met the President several times. I really don't think he would do this. But the thing is, I am troubled by the fact he will not tell us he will not. If he is a good man and we believe him to be a good man who would never kill noncombatants in a cafe in Houston, sitting out in a sidewalk cafe smoking--oh, that's right, you are not allowed to smoke cigarettes anymore--let's say they are sitting out in a cafe. If the President is not going to kill them, why would he not say he is not going to kill them there? That is the troubling aspect of this, if the President will not acknowledge he is not going to kill noncombatants in America. The real problem with this is we are now engaged in a limitless war. A lot of Americans may not know this but people all the time up here are saying it. You have to read between the lines sometimes to hear what they are saying. They are saying there is no geographic limit to the war. That is what Brennan has said. What does that mean? I thought we went to war in Afghanistan. I really thought that even at the time. I was not here, but I would have voted to go to war. I thought they were voting to go to war to get the people who attacked us on 9/11. I was all for it. I still am all for that. But we are now using that resolution to go to war to have no geographic limit for drone strikes anywhere in the whole world; and not only no geographic limit, no temporal limit, which means no timeline. There is no end to the war in Afghanistan. The war will never end. If you have no geographic limit--many on my side say the battlefield is everywhere, and the battlefield is in the United States. It is one thing to say that, but realize what they mean by that. They say because the battlefield is here, the laws of war apply. That is what a drone strike is. A drone strike is not something you do domestically. They are saying the laws of war apply. If you change the words around, what are the laws of war? Martial law. I think if you ask Americans are you in favor of martial law by the President, I don't think many would be. But many in this body would gladly give up their power, would gladly say America is now the battlefield so the laws of war should operate. The laws of war are that there really is no due process in war. I am not arguing for due process in war; I think it is, frankly, impossible. If you have gone as an American to Afghanistan and you are fighting against us, you don't get due process. You don't get your Miranda rights. It is an impossibility to have the Constitution operating in a battlefield. So I am not for that. But I am against defining the battlefield as being everywhere, including my house, my office, including everywhere in America. If it is a battlefield, you have no rights. The war zone is a zone where you do not get due process, you do not get Miranda rights, you do not get an attorney. But it should be different in our country. If our country is a battlefield, if our country is a war zone, what is left? I thought we were fighting to preserve our way. I thought we were fighting to preserve and protect our Constitution. What are we fighting for if we are not going to protect our rights at home? The Bill of Rights is too important to scrap it. The Bill of Rights is too important to let any President, Republican or Democrat, simply come forward and say: Well, I have not broken the Constitution yet, and I do not intend to break the Constitution, but I might because they are everywhere and the battlefield is everywhere and we are so frightened that we must do anything. I think it is good to be angry, upset, really to want vengeance sometimes against people who attack you. I was all for punishing those who attacked us after 9/11. But I think, also, at the same time we need to not let that get in the way of what is our way of life and what we are protecting here. When we look at this and we look at what is going on with terrorism, we need to keep in perspective that these people can do us harm, but they are incredibly weak people. They are incredibly cowardly, in a way. You know, they have no armies. They have the ability to inflict terrorism, which is what weak people do. People who have no armies and no strength attack the civilians. It is a weak and cowardly way to attack your enemies. But it is not something that we should cower so much that we say: Gosh, someday they may come and blow up the Senate, which would be terrible. I think the things terrorists do are terrible, but I am not saying that because we are so frightened of them coming that we should say: Why don't we just have camps again, you know? Why don't we just round up--the Japanese Americans were a threat in the war and we just rounded them up and, guess what. No Japanese Americans attacked us, so it must have worked. I think it was an abomination what we did, one of the worst and most tragic episodes in our history, and the fact that the courts upheld it. But are we so frightened we are going to give up on our Bill of Rights? Are we so frightened the next thing we are going to do is round up people of a different skin color because we think they have cousins who live in Lebanon? We cannot really give up on what makes America special. What makes America special is the Bill of Rights. What makes us special is really that we are not a democracy. There are a lot of democracies around the world. We are a republic. We are a constitutional republic. We are a country that enshrined our rights, took care and deliberation and wrote down our rights, and they are not supposed to be usurped by any majority. So it is important that we know we are not a democracy, we are a constitutional republic. It is important for me to know and say that my rights came from my Creator. You don't have to agree with me on that. Some people think they came naturally to them, but they think there is a natural state of being that is free. We do give up some freedom. We give up some freedom to pay taxes. If I work, all of my labor is mine, and I give up some of my labor and some of my wages to a government. To live in a civilized world you do give up a little bit. But what I have always argued for is that we should minimize what freedom we give up. That is why you should always minimize taxes. You should minimize the size of your government because everything you give up in taxes or everything you give up to your government is loss of your sweat equity, your labor. It is yours. It is nobody else's. So you give up the very minimum of it. There is another argument. That is sort of the freedom argument for why we should keep government minimized. The other argument for why we should keep government minimized is more of an efficiency argument. This comes from Milton Friedman, but I think he put it very succinctly. He said nobody spends somebody else's money as wisely or as frugally as you spend your own. It is a simple statement, but I think in one statement, one simple sentence, it sort of brings forward something about government that is very true. People up here just do not spend it wisely. The reason they don't spend it wisely is because it is not theirs. In fact, they have a perverse and wrongheaded incentive that says: I need to spend all of my money or I won't get it next year, so government agencies incredibly want to spend all the money and more to make sure there is nothing left at end of the year. If you listen to some people, they would say: Oh, no, government is just here to help people. Without government it would be--without this massive huge government--we have to have the debt because we need all the things we get from government. Will Rogers once wrote and said: ``You're lucky you don't get all the Government you are paying for.'' George Will recently wrote, and he sort of put a twist on it, and he said that used to be true, but now I think you are getting more government than you pay for. That is sort of the truth. We get a ton of government. Our taxes cover about 60 or 70 percent of what we spend up here. What kind of country gets rich borrowing 30 cents on every dollar? What kind of family can spend 30 percent more than comes in? Some things are pretty simple. Wealth accumulation for you or wealth accumulation for a country is by savings. You don't get wealthy by spending more money than comes in. So as we look to these things, I think we need to be cognizant of the reasons we would want to have smaller, not bigger, government. But we would have smaller government if we paid attention to the rules. The rules are very important, and when people talk about ``oh, that would be a monarchy of the law,'' or they say ``that would be too rigid to live under the laws, we need a living, breathing, evolving Constitution,'' I think things change over time. You get new technologies; drone strikes and things are new technologies. But I think what does not change are certain freedoms that are going to be the same now as they will be in 10,000 years. I think the freedom for people to worship is something that I don't want majority rule to decide. You say: What does the freedom to worship have to do with drone strikes? It is hard to worship after a Hellfire missile has been launched on you. So all of our rights--there is a panoply of rights that are all interconnected, and they come from the basic right to life. If you don't have the right to be secure in your person, you don't have any other rights. So as we diminish one right we attack at the foundation. But if we are at a foundation where we are saying we can strike a person in America with no trial, with no accusation, I think we have come a long way from where we began. I worry about it. I worry about it not just in the abstract sense, not just in the sense that these are a right in abstract and that we lose something we cannot actually touch or feel. I worry really about it in the sense that I don't know how you continue to exist as a country if you do not believe in some fundamental right, some fundamental right and wrong. After ObamaCare passed and there were some questions about its constitutionality, they asked a Representative from the House side--he was asked: What about constitutionality? He said: Why would I care? Most of the things we do up here have no constitutional justification. We have gotten to the point where people care more about having enough votes. They think it is right if you have a majority vote as opposed to that there are certain immutable rights and wrongs; that there are certain immutable rights that were there at the founding of our country that will be there in 100 years or 1,000 years from now: Your right to be secure in your person, the right that the government cannot take away these privileges. This is not a new fight. Really, from the beginning of time there has been a struggle with the people versus the leaders. The leaders always want more. The amazing thing is it is sort of like a contagion. Not many people get to be President in this country. One person gets to be. We have had in the forties--44 or 45 Presidents. We have not had many Presidents. But there is something contagious about the office. It is that power corrupts, I think. Lord Acton said it is not just that power corrupts, but that absolute power corrupts absolutely. I think people can become intoxicated with power. I don't know if that is the explanation for President Obama's about-face. He was one who at a time when he was in this body believed in some restraint, believed in Senate authority, believed in--actually he did not even believe in raising the debt ceiling when he was here. The thing is, what we would hope for is someday we have a President who believes, even after assuming office, that the powers of the office should be protected. I think we run the risk, as we allow more and more power to gravitate to the President, we run the risk of living under an imperial Presidency. I have said some inflammatory statements: that the President is acting like a king. Some of that is inflammatory and provocative, but some of it has some ring of truth to it or I would not get so much push-back. Kings operate by edict. They say it is so; make it so. There is no give-and-take. There are no checks and balances between the legislature and the Presidency. This has been going on for a long time. It is a titanic struggle and, frankly, I wish more people were interested in it. I wish we had a dozen people down here saying: No President should assume such authority. No President has the right to say he is judge, jury, and executioner. No President should be allowed to say that. It is not enough for him to say: My motives are good. I don't intend to do so. I haven't done so yet, but I might. If that is the standard we are going to live under, we have a great danger in our country. It is not enough. We live under the rule of law, and the law is quite explicit. The fifth amendment says no person shall be detained without an indictment or without due process. I find the answer to be incredibly easy. I have asked the President an easy question. My question is, Can you kill an American on American soil, a noncombatant, with a drone strike? It should be an easy answer. (Mr. HEINRICH assumed the chair.) When a President will not answer a question or when they answer the question and it is an evasive answer, our concern is if they answer yes. I thought they would never answer the question, but they finally did. They said: Yes, we can conceive of situations when we might. The situations they conceive of, though, are attacks on the country, which I don't disagree with, so they are talking about things that are not controversial. If planes are attacking the Twin Towers, New York or DC, there is not any question on either side of the aisle among almost anybody in the country or the universe who doesn't believe we can repel lethal threats. What we are talking about are the noncombatants who are either eating dinner, sleeping in their house or walking down the street. A large percentage of the drone strikes have been people who were not carrying arms or in combat. Were they bad people? I am not positive I could say one way or the other, but I don't want that sort of standard to be used in America. I don't want the standard to be that if someone is close to a bad person who happens to be a male between the ages of 16 and 50, that they are no longer a civilian but actually a militant. Is that the standard we are going to use in America? I don't want the standard to be sympathizing. Has anybody ever been on the Internet? Has anyone ever seen crackpots who are on the Internet and say all kinds of crazy things? If someone is saying crazy things and they happen to be against our government, is that enough for a Hellfire missile to come down on their house? Is sympathizing enough? People have written and talked about this. During the Vietnam war there were some people who probably were treasonist and probably should have been tried for treason. Having said that, I would not kill them without some sort of due process or trial. The idea of a right to trial by jury has been the basis of our history for hundreds and hundreds of years. It is the basis of a foundational principle for our country. I cannot imagine we would be so cavalier as to let it go. As we move forward with this nominating process, I have decided to occupy as much time as I can on the floor to bring attention to this issue. Ultimately, I cannot win. There are not enough votes. There would be if there was truly an uprising of bipartisan support that would come to the floor and say: It is not about John Brennan. It is about a constitutional principle and we are willing to delay this until the President can explicitly say noncombatants in America will not be killed with drone strikes. I think that is pretty easy to answer, but it has been like pulling teeth. I have written letter after letter for weeks and weeks trying to get an answer on this and we have not had much luck. There have been people who have written about the lawfulness of these lethal operations directed against citizens, and there is a question both in the country and outside the country of what the standard will be. Will it be the same standard? Some say there is no standard once we get outside the country and that anybody can be killed whether they are an American citizen or not. Frankly, I don't like the idea of no standard. For example, the most prominent American who was killed overseas was al-Awlaki. His name was publicly known to be on a kill list for months. I see no reason why he could not have been tried in a Federal court expeditiously--if he didn't return home, he would still be tried--given representation, and tried for treason. These are not frequent cases that occur overseas, so I see no reason why we would not use a Federal court. The Federal courts are adapted in such a way that we can go into secret session if there is classified material. The Federal courts in Washington, DC, Philadelphia, and New York have done this on occasion. I think we could do this in Federal court. We have convicted quite a few terrorists--I think that they number up to several hundred--in the United States in our courts. The main thing I object to is people becoming so fearful they cavalierly give up their rights. We had two terrorists in Bowling Green, KY, my hometown, which has 50,000 people. Who would have thought we would have two terrorists? They were conspiring to either buy or send Stinger missiles to Iraq. I am glad they were caught and punished. They were tried in a court. Many people said let's just send them to Guantanamo Bay forever. Once we go down that path where we are not going to have any due process-- our courts have done a pretty good job. In fact, I think we have not let off anybody from one of our courts that should have been kept here and tried. I do have a question as to how the terrorists got into the country. That goes back to the issue of not wanting terrorism to occur, but how should we combat it? Is it best if we combat it in Yemen, Mali, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan or should we combat terrorism by knowing who is coming into and leaving our country? For example, we have allowed 60,000 people from Iraq to come into this country in the last 2 or 3 years. Frankly, I think that is a lot. They come here under asylum. The problem with asylum is I thought asylum is when a county was escaping a dictatorship. We won the war in Iraq. They have a democratic government over there, and I would not understand why they would want to leave a democratic government. Also, the 60,000 who leave--other than maybe the two we captured in Bowling Green, we presume that most of them are pro-Western--are the people we want to run Iraq. There are all kinds of reasons to stay in Iraq to run the country. In letting so many people come in, we didn't do a very good job because the two terrorists who were allowed to go to Bowling Green had their fingerprints on an IED that was in a warehouse somewhere. They did not find a match on any of the fragments with their fingerprints on a database until after we caught them. Once we knew their names and had their fingerprints, we checked some fragments for their fingerprints that had been in a warehouse for years and years. So we are not quite doing the job. Sometimes we want to analyze so much information that we get overwhelmed with the information too. We collect millions and millions and billions of pieces and bits of information, but it cannot all be analyzed. Some of it, I fear, goes against our rights to privacy. Any of our e-mails that are over 6 months old can be looked at. We found out about this recently when we had an adulterous affair in our military. I believe our third-party records are ours. I had an amendment recently on this, and I told people my Visa bill is pretty private. Just because I use my Visa card doesn't mean I have given up my information and that the government gets to look at my Visa bill every month, but that is what we have done. A lot of these things have been slipping away from us for a long time. It is not just President Obama; it is 40 or 50 years of court cases. Thirty, forty or fifty years ago, we decided that once a third party had your records, they were not private anymore. I think that is absurd. Think of the age we live in and how a lot of people don't use cash at all. Our Visa cards have everything on it. We can look at a person's Visa card and find out if they have seen a psychiatrist, what kind of medicines they are on, what kind of magazines they get, what kind of books they get. We can look at a person's Visa bill and find out if they gamble or drink or what their travel plans are. We can find out a ton of information on a person's Visa bill. Should people be allowed to look at a Visa bill, without asking a judge, and then say: We think he is involved in this. We are not saying we cannot do this for a terrorist, but what we should do is go to a judge and present some evidence and say we think he is a terrorist and we want to look at his Visa bill. People in America should not be able to have their Visa bill open to scrutiny, and that is basically what we have now. Our banking records, our Visa statements, and all our records that are held by a third party are not protected. Some people may have heard about how they want to have cyber security. Everybody wants their computers to be secure, including the computer companies. They work nonstop trying to keep hackers out of computers, but the law they want to pass gives immunity to the computer companies. A lot of us don't think much of it. We check off the confidentiality button and hope that after we have signed the contract, they will not share it. They share it in a way that is anonymous, and we put up with that in order to get a search engine. I am OK with that. What I am concerned about is when we pass the cyber security bill, we cannot sue them if they breach the policy. So then everybody's computer, searches, and reading habits are open to the Federal Government. Because we are fearful of people coming at us and fearful of attacks, we give up our rights. I thought we were fighting to preserve our rights. So what are we fighting for? These battles are going on and on throughout the government. The interesting thing about these battles is that they are not always Republican v. Democrat. These are battles that are sometimes coalitions of people from the right and people from the left who have gotten together and fought over these issues. In the case of trying to get the President to acknowledge he will not do drone strikes, there have been people on the Democratic side of the aisle who have aligned with me and helped me get this information. The President probably would have refused until Hell froze over to give me anything, but the fact is we had Democrats ask to get information also. Suddenly we were able to get a coalition and get the information, but it has not been easy. The fact that they don't want to acknowledge limitations as to the President's power worries me that they believe in an expansive Presidential power. In order to stop that, we have to be protective of our rights. We have to be able to not so easily give up on our rights. There is a white paper that was written, and the title of it is ``The lawfulness of a lethal operation directed against a U.S. Citizen who is an operational leader of al-Qaida, foreign associated forces,'' and this is from the Department of Justice. This white paper sets forth a legal framework for considering the circumstances for which the U.S. Government could use lethal force. One of the things they do in the document--this was leaked repeatedly--is they tell of the criteria for when they can kill people overseas. We don't know the criteria for killing people in this country. They make a contention that the rules will be different, but no one is acknowledging exactly whom they can kill or what the rules will be. For the people who are killed overseas by drone strikes, the thing they come up with is that they say it has to be an imminent threat, but it does not have to be immediate. To my thinking, only a bunch of government lawyers could come up with a definition for imminent threat that says it is not immediate, so that is the first problem with it. Is that going to be the standard that is used in America, that there has to be an imminent threat, but it doesn't have to be immediate? My next question is: What does that mean? Does that mean noncombatants who we think might someday be combatants are an imminent threat? It is a pretty important question. What is imminent. There is no question of what imminent lethal force is. If someone is aiming a gun, a missile or a bomb at you, there is an imminent threat, and no one questions that. No one questions using lethal force to stop any kind of imminent attack. We become a little bit worried when the President says imminent doesn't have to mean immediate. When that happens--and then we see from the unclassified portion of the drone attacks overseas--many of these people are not involved in combat. They might someday be involved in combat, they might have been involved in combat, but when we kill them, most of them are not involved in combat. So even overseas there is some question of this program, but my questions are primarily directed toward what we do in this country. It says the U.S. Government can use lethal force in a foreign country outside the area of active hostilities. That is, once again, the point. We are not talking about a battlefield. But because the battlefield has no limits--since the battlefield is not just Afghanistan. The battlefield has no geographic limits so the battlefield is the whole world, and many in this body say the battlefield is the United States. So once we acknowledge and admit that the battlefield is the United States, this whole idea of what is imminent versus what is immediate becomes pretty important because we are talking about our neighbors now. The other thing about this is we need to try to understand who these terrorists are. Members of al-Qaida. There are no people walking around with a card that says ``al-Qaida'' on it. There are bad people. There were bad people associated with the terrorists--and we have killed a lot of them--who were in Afghanistan training and part of the group that attacked us. But there are terrorists all over the world who are unhappy with their own local governments--some of them are unhappy with us too--but to call them al-Qaida is sometimes a stretch and sometimes open to debate as to who is and who isn't. Then they use other words, and words are important. They are either a ``member of al-Qaida'' or ``associated forces.'' I don't know what that means. Does one have to talk to al-Qaida or commit terrorism or does a person have to be in a country where we are supporting the government and people are attacking the government? It is not always clear. The other question we get to when it is either al-Qaida or people associated with al-Qaida is that now we get to the United States and we have the government defining what they say as terrorism. So the government has put out some documents, one by the Bureau of Justice, to warn us of who might be a terrorist. In fact, the government has programs where they want people to inform: If you see someone, tell someone. If you see these people, you are supposed to inform on them. So some of the characteristics of the people who might be terrorists-- and I don't know, they don't have to be an imminent threat or an immediate threat, but some of these people might be terrorists. I don't know. If the President is going to kill these people, he needs to let them know. Some of the people who might be terrorists might be missing fingers. Some people may have stains on their clothing or some people may have changed the color of their hair, some people may have accumulated guns, some people may have accumulated weatherized ammunitions, which might be half the hunters in the South this time of year, or people who might like to pay in cash, or people who have seven days of food on hand. I know people who just for religious reasons are taught to keep food on hand. In fact, government Web sites sometimes tell us to keep food on hand for hurricanes. If you live along the coast, one government Web site says keep food on hand, and another one says if you do, you might be a terrorist. They are not saying you are, but if these are the characteristics of terrorism, would you not be a little concerned that if the government is putting this list out, we are going to drop Hellfire missiles from drones on people in America who might be on this list? I am particularly concerned about that. So I think we can't be sloppy about this. We can't allow ourselves to be so I guess afraid of terrorism or afraid of our enemies that we give up on what makes us Americans. What makes us Americans are our constitutional rights that are enshrined in our Constitution. It is why we have gone to war, to defend these rights. Will we think the war still has purpose if we are no longer able to enjoy these rights at home? The problem as I see it as we go forward is that I wish I could tell people there is an end to this, that there would be a grand battle for our constitutional rights or for what rights we lose overseas, what rights we lose here if we travel. The problem is they don't see an end to the war. They see perpetual war, perpetual war without geographic limits, and they see the battlefield here, so they want the laws of war to apply not only there but here. In other words, what they are saying is the laws of war are martial law. These are the laws of war. These are the laws that are accepted in war. We accept a lot of things on the battlefield that we don't want to accept here. I acknowledge we accept that we don't get Miranda rights on the battlefield. We don't get due process. We don't get an attorney. If they are shooting at us, we shoot back and kill them. But the thing is if a person is sitting in a cafe in Houston, they do get Miranda rights, they do get accused of a crime, they do get a jury of their peers. That is what we are talking about here. The President should unequivocally come forward and state that noncombatants--people not involved with lethal force--will not have drones dropped on them. The other thing he should acknowledge is the law--not only the constitutional law but the law since the Civil War--has said the military doesn't operate in the United States. There is a reason for the military not operating in the United States. Why? The military operates under different rules of engagement than policemen. The rules are stricter for policemen. We do it because we are not in a war here so the policemen have to call judges. A lot of people don't think this through, though, and they will say, These people are terrible, awful people who would cut your head off. They are right; they really are bad people. We have really bad people in our country too sometimes. We have murderers and rapists. But tonight at 4 a.m. if there is a rapist going around the neighborhood and you get to a house and there isn't an imminent thing going on but you are told he might be in this house, before the door is broken down, they call on a cell phone, they get a judge out of bed, and they say, we have chased him into this neighborhood, no one is answering, we want to break the door down, can we have a warrant. Most of the time the police have to call for a warrant. We have a process. But when he is arrested, they don't just string him up. We don't have lynchings in our country. We don't let mobs decide who is guilty and who is not. I don't question the President's motives. I don't think the President would purposefully take innocent people and kill them. I really don't think he would drop a Hellfire missile on a cafe or a restaurant as I have been talking about. But it bothers me that he won't say he won't. It also bothers me that when he was a Senator in this body and when he was a candidate, he had a much higher belief and standard for civil liberties and he seems to have lost that since he has been the President. I think this is an important issue. It goes beyond John Brennan. It goes beyond the President. It goes to an issue that rises above I think all other issues we consider here. I have voted for three of the President's nominees, not because I agreed with them politically; in fact, I disagreed with the vast majority, but I disagree with the President on a lot of political issues. I voted for his nominations because I think the President does get some prerogative in deciding who his political appointees are. I have chosen to make a stand on this one and not so much because of the person but the principle of this. I have nothing personally against Brennan. I have nothing personally against the President. But I have a great deal of concern about the rights that were enshrined in the Constitution. I have a great deal of concern about this slippery slope of saying there won't be accusations, there won't be trials, that we will summarily execute people, and the question is, will we execute noncombatants. If he is not going to, he ought to say so. In this white paper that was released, they talked about the three different conditions. One of them was imminence, but then they qualified it by saying imminent doesn't have to be immediate. Another one was feasibility. They said it is not feasible to get some of these people overseas and so we kill them. But feasibility, to a certain extent, could be defined as convenience. So the question is, in America, what if they live up in the Rocky Mountains and there are no roads leading up to where they are; they are not very accessible; it is not very feasible; so we are going to do strikes based on convenience. Is that going to be the standard? When we talk about standards, they say they have a process in place, but the process is very important. The standard is important, but it is also important that one group of people, one political group of people or one politician doesn't get to decide that standard. And part of the way the process in our country works is that there are checks and balances between the three branches of government so that one branch of government doesn't get to unilaterally decide what these standards are. Because some of the standards are a little bit loose--whether you are near someone. Apparently, we are not counting civilians who are killed by drone strikes if they are males between the ages of 16 and 50. If they were close to the people we are targeting, we just count them as other militants. Are we going to do that in the United States? If you are eating with 15 of your family members and one of them may or may not be communicating by e-mail with somebody in a Middle Eastern country, can we kill all 20 of them, and because some of them are within the right age group, that is fine? Let's say you are eating with your cousin who is communicating with somebody in the Middle East and that person may or may not be a bad person, and then when you leave-- let's say you are going to a wedding and you are going from a preparty and there are 20 cars all going to the wedding and they know or they think they know there may be a bad person among the group; why don't we just strike the caravan? These are called signature strikes. The Wall Street Journal said that the bulk of our drone strikes overseas are signature strikes. That is a good question for the President: Are signature strikes going to be the standard for killing Americans in America? The President simply says the rules will probably be different for inside than outside. Well, I frankly don't think that is good enough. He says he has no intent to kill Americans in America. I frankly don't think that is good enough. I don't think it is good enough for the President to say I have no intention of breaching the fifth amendment. Intending not to is not the same as saying I won't. His oath of office says I will not--no, it says: I will protect, defend, and preserve the Constitution. It doesn't say I intend to protect, defend, and preserve the Constitution except for when it is infeasible or inconvenient. That is not what the rules are about. I think the rules are pretty absolute. The rules are the Bill of Rights and they are ours. We got them from our Creator. They were enshrined in the Constitution. Nobody gets to take them from us. Nobody. No President from any party gets to be judge, jury, and executioner. This decision to let this go, to let this nomination go without an answer is a big mistake for us. If we do this--if we let this nomination go without a debate, without significant opposition, without demanding more answers from the President--the problem is we are never getting any more answers. There will be some in this body who say, Well, just let it go. The snow is coming and we want to go home. The problem is that he is never going to answer these questions unless he is forced to. I suspect George Bush would have been the same. I suspect a lot of the Presidents would be the same. And I think it is unfortunate that they see their power and their sphere of power as being more important than our constitutional rights. But we won't get this by just the glad hand and the winning smile. That is not going to get any information from the President. The only way this President would ever give us information is if we were to stop this nomination. I am not even saying stop it personally. My objection really is not so much to Brennan being in charge of the CIA as my objection is to the program and to the President not admitting that he can't do drone strikes in America. I will continue to do what I can to draw attention to this and we will see where things lead. But I am disappointed in the President. I am one who while I am a Republican--I didn't vote for him in 2008 or 2012--I am one who has admired certain aspects of his policy. I admired his defense of civil liberties. I admired him in 2007 when he said Americans shouldn't be involved in torture. I admired him when he said we should follow the rule of law and we should have warrants before we tap people's phones and that we shouldn't be trolling through people's records. But I find a great irony and, frankly, a great hypocrisy in someone who would defend getting warrants before we tap your phone but won't defend a trial before we kill you. Tapping one's phone is a breach of privacy and it should only be done if a person has been accused of a crime and evidence has been presented and a judge grants a warrant. But killing someone with no due process, with no judicial oversight--some are saying, Oh, we will get to it. We are eventually going to set up a court, maybe a FISA court. Unfortunately, a FISA court probably won't be good enough because it will be in secret and a person should have a chance to confront their accusers and have a public trial if a person is going to be killed. Typically what I am talking about is American citizens, but there needs to be some oversight. But the problem of waiting to do this and saying, Oh, we will do this sometime, we will get to it eventually, never happens. The same way with saying, Oh, we will get to--we will keep asking the President for more information, but it never happens. If we do not take a stand for something we believe in, it is going to slip away from us. I think our rights are gradually eroding. I think they are gradually slipping away from us. I think the understanding of the Constitution as a document that restrains the government, that restrains the size and scope of the government, has been lost on a lot of people. I think it is something we shouldn't give up on. When the President goes through his three different items that were leaked through this memo, he says there has to be an imminent threat. He says their capture has to be inconvenient or infeasible. And he says the operation of killing the person has to be conducted within a manner consistent with the applicable law of war. Here is the problem. That sounds fine if you are in Afghanistan and in the mountains fighting a war. But I am talking about downtown Washington, DC. I am talking about living in the suburbs of Houston or Atlanta. Are we going to have drone strike programs in America consistent with the applicable law of war? See, the other way to put ``law of war''--and this is not a stretch, this is just turning the words around--``martial law.'' Now people, if you put it that way, might have a little different impression. Do we want martial law in our country? If you go back to the battle we had over indefinite detention last year, where they are saying they can take a citizen without a trial and actually send them from America to Guantanamo Bay if they are accused of terrorism--accused, not convicted; accused of terrorism--you start to worry about some of the stuff happening in our country, that this could actually happen. One of the sort of ironies of looking at different governments and looking at what makes people unhappy--in Tahrir Square in Cairo, there have been hundreds of thousands of people protesting. It is interesting what they are protesting. One of the large things they are protesting is something called an emergency decree, which I believe went in place by Mubarak 20-some-odd years ago. So you get leaders who come in, and they use fear to accumulate power, and you get a decree. So you get martial law. The martial law, ironically enough, in Egypt allows detention without trial. They do have the right to trial, but there is an exception, and it has been accepted for the last 20-some-odd years, and the people are hopping mad over it. So we get involved in their country and their politics and give them money and weapons, and we have some of the same debate and problems here at home--whether or not you can indefinitely detain. The President's response to this was also pretty disappointing. It would not have become law without him. I think he threatened to veto it, and then he signed it anyway. Empty threats are of no value, and he struck no great blow for America or for American freedoms by not vetoing this. But when he signed it, he said something similar to what he is saying now. He said: Well, I have no intent to indefinitely detain people. Am I the only one in America who is a little bit underwhelmed by the President saying he has no intent to detain somebody but he is going to sign it into law saying he has the power to? That is the same thing we are getting now in this drone strike program: Don't worry. Everything is OK. I am your leader, and I would never detain you. I would never shoot Hellfire missiles at noncombatants. I will not do that. I can take him at his word, but what about the next guy and the next guy? In 1923, when they destroyed the currency in Germany, they elected Hitler. I am not saying anybody is Hitler, so do not misunderstand me. I am saying there is a danger, even in a democratic country, that someday you get a leader who comes in, in the middle of chaos, and says: Those people did it. Those people are the mistake. Those people are who we need to root out. If the laws have been removed that prevented that from happening, if the laws have been removed and they say: We can indefinitely detain--in Hitler's case, he said: The Jews, those bankers, the Jews did this to us. And they were indefinitely detained. Now, am I saying this is going to happen in our country? Unlikely. I cannot imagine any of our leaders, for all of our disagreements, doing that. But if you do not have the law to protect you, you do not have that protection because you do not know who the next guy is and the next guy or the next woman. When Madison wrote about this, he was very explicit. He said: We have these rules in place because we do not have a government of angels. If we had a government of angels, we would not need these rules. I will never forget the discussion with somebody about the Kelo case. The Kelo case was a case where the government took private property and gave it to a richer person who had private property who wanted to develop it. Ironically, the justification they used was blight. So they take it from one middle-class person and give it to a rich corporation, and they say they are doing that to rectify blight. But when they did that and when they came down with the ruling, it was concerning the logic of the way they get to this ruling, that basically they really do not have this right to your property. When the Kelo decision came down, it really bothered me. But I remember we started having the battle in our local government. In our local government, there was a battle over a resolution. The resolution said--it was in the city council--the resolution said the local city government cannot take private land and give it to another person. It was really like so many other things. The intention of eminent domain was to have highways and thoroughfares that you might not get otherwise, but it was never intended to take from a private owner and give to a corporation. That is what they did with the Kelo decision. So, anyway, local governments began talking about this, and I was talking to one of my local government officials--this is probably 20 years ago, 15 years ago--and their response was, but I would never do that. I would never take private land through eminent domain and give it to another corporation. I would never do that. And I believed that person. And I really, frankly, give the President the benefit of the doubt. I do not question his motives. I do not think he probably will kill noncombatants. But I certainly do not want him to claim that he has the authority to kill noncombatants. So this is a big deal. It is a huge deal. So with the eminent domain, we finally passed it in our local commission. It was like 3 to 2, but in my town in Kentucky, you cannot take private property with eminent domain and give it to another private individual, because it is not about the individuals involved, it is about the fact that we do not always have angels running our government. We do not always know whom we are going to get. If we ask the question, Do you want a government that is run by majority rule or a government that is restrained by its documents, it is a pretty important question. Ultimately, there are ramifications to majority rule, to basically whatever the majority wants. One, the majority can vote upon minority rules they do not pass on themselves. In fact, Martin Luther King wrote--this is one of my favorite quotes from him--he said: An unjust law is any law that a majority passes on a minority but does not make binding on themselves. I thought it was a great statement because you could probably almost apply that to any law written on any subject. If the law excludes certain people and is not applied to everyone, then by definition it is an unjust law. What a great way to put it succinctly and a great way that we should look as far as trying to write rules. But you have to decide as a country whether you want majorities or politicians to decide things or whether you want reliance on documents and on a process and on a rule of law that protects you. If we rely on, basically, the whims of politicians, I think it is a big mistake. If we are going to rely on the politician basically sitting in the Oval Office going through flashcards and a PowerPoint presentation to make the decision on life and death for Americans in America, I think it is a huge mistake. Any people who watch trials and court cases realize that even courts are not perfect. It is actually amazing how we even get it wrong with courts and trials and juries. Many States and even many people who were for the death penalty have questioned their support of the death penalty because of the imperfection of our courts. Through DNA testing, we have found we do not always get it right even with that. I think in Illinois they stopped the death penalty after having so many DNA testings that showed there was an incorrect diagnosis of who had committed the crime. So the question becomes, even with all the checks and balances of the court, are you worried at all about having one politician accuse, secretly charge, I guess--if you can call it a charge--and then execute Americans? I am incredibly troubled by that. I cannot imagine we as a free country would let that stand. I think it is an insult to every soldier in uniform fighting for American freedom around the world that we would just give up on ours at home, that the President would cavalierly or incorrectly or without forethought, without sufficient forethought, not tell us, not go ahead and explicitly say: This will never happen in America. His answer to me should not have been, no, we will not kill noncombatants. It should be, never--no, never. We will never in America come to that. Under my watch, we will never, ever allow this to happen in America. It is incredibly disappointing. It should be disappointing to all Americans or anyone who believes in this. We have to realize that trying to figure out guilt or innocence is very complicated. Anybody who has ever served on a jury realizes how difficult it is to determine guilt. And sometimes you are unsure. Some cases are actually decided by, gosh, the evidence was so equal, but there was not a preponderance. I could not become completely convinced, and this person is going to be put to death? Contrast the feeling a juror has and what a juror is trying to do in finding innocence or guilt and letting someone be punished by death with our current standard. Our current standard for killing someone overseas is that you can be sympathizing, you can be close to people who we think are bad, you can be in a caravan that we say bears the signature of bad people. Now, there is another debate that can be had about whether those are sufficient standards for war. And the standards are different for war in our country. But we have to adamantly and unequivocally stand up and say to those who would say this is a battlefield: The hell it is a battlefield. This is our country. If you want to say this is a battlefield--if you say we are going to have the laws of war here, we are going to have martial law here--by golly, let's have a debate about it. Let's have a discussion in the country. Let's have everybody talking about, are we the battlefield? Is this a battlefield? Is our country a battlefield? Because what that means is that you get no due process in a battlefield. I am not here to argue and say that you get due process in a battlefield. I am here to argue that we cannot let America be a battlefield because we cannot say that we are no longer going to have due process, that we are no longer going to have trial by jury, that we are no longer going to have presentment of charges and grand juries. It is impossible in a battlefield. In Afghanistan, it is impossible to say: Hey, wait a minute, can I read you your Miranda rights? It is impossible. We are not arguing for that. We are not arguing for a judge or a jury or anything else. If people are shooting at our troops, they can do everything possible, including drone strikes. It is not even the technology so much that I am opposed to, but the technology opens doors that we need to be concerned with. Defense of our soldiers in war--there is no due process involved with that. But realize the danger to saying America is at war, America is the battlefield, because also realize the danger that these people-- they are Republicans and Democrats--these people do not believe there is any limit to the war, there is no geographic limit, and there is no temporal limit. It is a perpetual war. And many of them--if you prompt them or provoke them--will open up and say: Oh, yes, America is a battlefield. We need the laws of war. And you ask them: When is the war going to end, When will we win the war, they will admit it--some of them will frankly admit it. They will say the war may go on for a long time. Some have talked about a 100-year war, 100 years being in these countries. But basically we are talking about perpetual war. We are talking about a war with no geographic limit, no temporal limit, and a war that has come to our country. There will be bad people who come to our country whom we need to repel. We are not talking about that. If planes are being flown into the Twin Towers, we have the right to shoot them down with our military. That is an act of war. No one questions that. If someone is standing outside the Capitol with a grenade launcher, we have a lot of brave Capitol policemen. I hope they kill the person immediately. Lethal force to repel lethal force has never been questioned by anybody and is not even controversial. But they want to make the debate about that and not about killing noncombatants driving in their car down Constitution or sitting in a cafe on Massachusetts Avenue. There may be bad people who are driving in their car, and there may be bad people sitting in cafes around the country. If there are, accuse them of a crime, arrest them and try them. The battlefield coming to America or acknowledging that is an enormous mistake. So there are some big issues, some issues that we as a country gloss over. We watch the nightly news. There is sometimes so much hysteria about so many issues, so many people yelling back and forth. But this is an issue that I think if we could get a frank discussion--I have proposed to the leadership--I have not had much luck with this--but I proposed for a constitutional debate or a debate of importance that everybody come, and instead of hearing me all day, we take 2 or 3 minutes and we go around the room and everybody speaks, it is limited, but there is some kind of debate and discussion--less speechmaking and more debate. I proposed we have lunch together. I have asked to come to the Democratic lunch. I have not gotten the invitation secured yet. It has only been 2 years so it may happen, but there are many reasons for discussion. There are many reasons why we should have civility. There are reasons why people on both sides of the aisle can agree to this. If we were to have a vote, maybe not on the nomination but a vote on restricting drones--there is a bill out there that we are working on that would restrict drones to imminent threats. It does not even get into the distinction of the military--things in the country would be the FBI; it would not be the military because that is the law. There is an important reason for the law. But we have a bill we are going to come forward with that we are working on that would simply say there has to be a real imminent lethal threat, something we can see. Then I think people could agree to that because it is not so much the drone we object to. If some guy is robbing a liquor store 2 blocks from here and the policemen come up and he comes out brandishing a gun, he or she can be shot. Once again, they do not get Miranda rights. They do not get a trial. They do not get anything. If you come out brandishing a weapon and people are threatened by it, you can be shot. So it is important to know what we are talking about. We are not talking about the guy coming out of the liquor store with a weapon. Even a drone could kill him if the FBI had drones. So my objection to drones is not so much the technology. There may be a use for law enforcement here, but there is also potential for abuses. Many government agencies have drones. These hopefully will remain unarmed drones. This is a different subject. But it is a subject that sort of dovetails from this into the next subject, which is, should you have protection from the government snooping--from the government looking through your bedroom windows? I remember that issue when I read ``1984'' when I was in high school. It bothered me, but I could not quite connect. I felt somewhat secure in the sense that we did not have two-way televisions. This was back in the 1970s. We did not have the ability to look at people. The government could not look at me in my house 24 hours a day. So you kind of get the feeling for how terrible it would be for that to happen. But technology was behind that. Actually ``1984'' was written, I think, in 1949. So talk about--he was truly being able to foresee the future. But now fast forward another 30 or 40 years and look at the technology we have now. We have drones that are less than an ounce, presumably with cameras--it is hard for me to believe that-- but less than an ounce with a camera. It is not impossible to conceive that you could have a drone fly outside your window and see what your reading material is. It is not impossible to say they could not send drones up to your mailbox and read at least what kind of mail you are getting or where it is from. It is not inconceivable that drones could follow you around. We had an important Supreme Court case last year, though, that was a blow for privacy. This was a Supreme Court case that had to do with GPS tagging. Everyone knows what GPS is. But what they were doing is the police were shooting them to cars or tagging them when you were not with your car and then following you around waiting for you to commit a crime. If you tag everybody's car and wait for them to speed, we are going to have a big deal on fines. There is going to be a problem. There is also a problem with following people around waiting for people to commit a crime. So the Supreme Court ruled, I think it was unanimously, that you have to have a warrant to do that. The thing about surveillance is those of us who believe in privacy are not arguing against any surveillance. What we are arguing is that you have to have a reason to do it and you have to ask a judge for permission. So it is not a society where there is no surveillance or a society where you have absolute privacy. If you commit a crime, the police go to the judge and ask for permission to do this. But there are some worrisome things about the direction of drones. For example, the EPA now has drones. The EPA is flying drones over farmland. I think some of this may be even in the defecation patterns of the cows. I do not know exactly what they are looking for because manure in streams is said to be a pollutant and, actually, frankly, thousands of animals might. But the whole idea, if you think someone is dumping anything in a stream--I am not opposed to having laws stopping that, get a warrant, search them or get a warrant and spy on them with a satellite or drone or whatever you want to do. But you have to have some kind of probable cause they are committing a crime. Because you can imagine that we would devolve into a society where every aspect of our life would just be open to the government to watch what we are doing. They say there is something called an open spaces concept. They say: You have 40 acres. The land is open so it is not private anymore. I think that is absurd. I think that is sort of analogous to the whole banking secrecy, such as you gave your records to your bank so you do not care if anybody looks at them. That is absurd. I have a 40-acre farm. I go hunting out there. I am supposed to not care if people watch me, everything I do once I am outside my house. My privacy is only in my house and not in open spaces? I disagree with that. One of the interesting things about the right to privacy, and you actually get some disagreement from people on the right about this. There was a case called the Griswold case. It had to do with birth control. A lot of conservatives objected to it because they saw it as a building block for Roe v. Wade. I am pro-life and did not like the decision in Roe v. Wade, but I actually do not mind the decision in Griswold so much. The reason is, going back to a little bit of the discussion we had earlier on Lochner, is that with Griswold, what I see is they talked about a right to privacy. Some said--the conservatives who are worried about the judiciary coming up with new things or creating things--they thought the right to privacy was not in the Constitution so you do not have it. I think that is a mistake in notion. Because, for example, the right to private property, that is not in the Constitution either, but I do not think any of the Founding Fathers or most of us today would argue you do not have a right to private property. In fact, I think it is one of the most important parts. In fact, there was some debate about having it in there. But I think the right to privacy, the right to private property, they are part of what I would call the unenumerated rights. The unenumerated rights are basically everything else not given to the government. You gave the government--or we give the government, through the compact of the Constitution, we give the government enumerated powers. There are about 17 to 19, depending on how you count them. But as Madison said, they are ``few and defined.'' When you talk about the rights, though, the 9th and 10th amendment will say those rights not specifically delegated to the Federal Government are left to the States and the people respectively. They are not to be disparaged. So the interesting thing about your rights is there is not sort of a list of your rights. In fact, when the Founding Fathers were putting together the Bill of Rights, one of the objections to the Bill of Rights was they said if we put the Bill of Rights together, everybody will think that is all of their rights. They will say, if it is not listed, you do not get it. So the 9th and 10th amendments were an important part of it. In fact, I do not know I would have voted for the Bill of Right's inclusion if you did not have the 9th and 10th. I like all the others, of course. But then the 9th and 10th protect all those not mentioned. So it is an interesting thing that some on the right disagree. In fact, the majority does not like the Griswold decision. But I actually kind of like it because I think your right to privacy is yours, the same as I think your right to private property is yours. It was not delegated, it was not taken, it was not given to the Federal Government. It is yours. It gets back to the sort of the primacy of liberty, the primacy of your individual freedom that you did not get that, you were not given your freedom by government. It was yours naturally or, as many of us believe, it is comes from your Creator. So your rights are national and inborn. They were enshrined in the Constitution, not given to you but enshrined and protected. As Patrick Henry said, it is not that the Constitution was instituted among men to protect the government, they were to protect the people from the government. It was to limit the size of government, to try to restrain the size of government, to try to allow for a government that lived under a rule of law. When Hayek said nothing distinguishes an arbitrary government from a constitutional government more clearly than this concept of the rule of law, the important thing about the rule of law is also that the rule of law is something that--it gives a certainty. Businessmen have talked about certainty. Without relinquishing the floor, I would like to hear a few comments from Senator Lee.

Mr. PAUL. Absolutely. At this point, I will entertain comments from Senator Cruz and a question.

Mr. PAUL. I will not yield the floor, but I will acknowledge a question to the Chair.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be waived.

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, as some of you may have heard, we are a bit short of money. We are borrowing $50,000 every second. We borrow over $4 billion every day. In a year's time we borrow over $1 trillion. There are ramifications to that. Some economists now say that the burden of our debt is costing us 1 million jobs a year. What I am asking is, in the midst of this sequester when people say we have no money to cut, to take this small item. Why would I want to cut this small group? There are a couple of reasons. It is called the National Security Working Group--about $2.8 million, which is not much money in terms of Washington. But why would I want to cut it? The first reason would be that there are no records of them meeting. We heard about the START treaty. It was in 2009 when they were last meeting. There are no public records that this group, which spends $700,000 a year, has met in the last 3 years. There are no public records of who works for the committee. There are no public records of their salaries. Every one of my staff's name and salary is printed in the public record--not for this group. Now, they say we need this group to negotiate treaties. Well, we have a group; it is called the Foreign Relations Committee. I am on the Foreign Relations Committee, and that is where we discuss treaties--or at least we are supposed to. The Foreign Relations Committee has dozens of employees, and millions of dollars are spent on our committee. It goes through the regular process. Our staff's salaries are approved, the names are in the public record, and if you object, you know where to look for the information. To fund a group that has no records and no records of them meeting and doesn't tell you where they are paying the salaries I don't think makes any sense. Our job is to look at the money as if it were ours, as if it were yours, and pay attention to detail. Will this balance the budget? No. Is it a place we should start? Yes. Absolutely. What I would call for is looking and saving where we can. In my office, I have a $3.5 million budget. I saved $600,000 last year, and I turned it back in to the Treasury. That doesn't balance the budget, but we have to start somewhere. This is another $700,000. If I win this one vote, I could save $700,000--or at least save us from borrowing another $700,000. If all of your elected officials were up here doing the same, we would be much closer to a resolution. I turned in $600,000 to the Treasury--18 percent of my budget--and I didn't lay off anybody because we are careful about the way we spend. We spend as if it were our own money. If all of our public officials were doing that, imagine what we could do. I have another bill that will never see the light of day up here because they don't want to fix anything. This bill would give bonuses to civil servants--Federal employees--who find savings. Right now we do the opposite. If your budget is $12 million and you work somewhere in the bureaucracy of government, you want to spend it at the end of the year so you can get it next year. I would change that incentive. I would give that civil servant a significant bonus if they will keep money at the end of the year and turn it back in to the Treasury. Can you imagine the savings from top to bottom throughout government if we did that? But if we were to do that, to ask civil servants to do that and look for these savings--and right now, with the sequester, people throughout government are looking for savings--why shouldn't we start with the Senate? Why would we continue to fund a group where the work they supposedly do is also done officially by another group which has many employees, a large staff, and it is the constitutional mandate of the Foreign Relations Committee to discuss treaties. So while this is a small bit of money, it is symbolic of what needs to go on in this country in order to rectify a problem that is truly bankrupting the American people. Amendment No. 25 Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to call up amendment No. 25.