Jeff Sessions

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Let me say a more accurate explanation of how this happened. The Congressional Budget Office scored this as a surplus, indeed, over 10 years. And, as Senator McCain said, the benefits only come out after 5 years and these are people paying in, so the real benefits and payments take place in outer years. The question is, Is the plan sufficient to be actuarially sound for the distant future when the payouts occur? So what happened was, Mr. Orszag had been CBO Director. He said it was not a gimmick and not a Ponzi scheme. In one sense, he was telling the truth. He was using a window score from the Congressional Budget Office over the first 10 years, when it didn't pay out any benefits and had a surplus, to claim that this was going to make the bill itself financially sound. In a sense, to me, it is these kinds of gimmicks that might keep somebody from being prosecuted and sent to jail if they were a private person. This ought to end in the Congress. I think the American people are crying out for honesty in budgeting. They want us to be responsible. They want us to tell them the good news but to also tell them the bad news financially that we face. They know we can't do things we would like to do if we don't have the money. They know we don't have the money to keep taking on new obligations. So I feel as though this is not healthy. When Secretary Sebelius came along and had to certify that they had a 75-year actuarially sound program, there was no way she could do it. It knocks a gaping hole into the entire scheme, this health care bill. I think it is a lesson for all of us. On every vote we do, we need to be sure we are honest not only in the short-term window but in the long-term window also.

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I thank Senator Vitter for those comments. We are going to look forward to being very hospitable to the fabulous LSU fans who will be in Tuscaloosa for the ``Titanic tussle in Tuscaloosa,'' the game of the century, many are calling it, the match of the millennium, between Alabama and LSU. It is always a big game, and it is going to be a big game especially this year. While we have a minute on the floor and there is no other business being conducted, I just wish to celebrate college football, particularly in the Southeastern Conference. When we go to those games and see the color and the crowd and the enthusiasm and the roar for the home team, it is a thrilling event. It is very special. The fans in Tuscaloosa are very sophisticated. They know this is a big game, one of the biggest games in the history of the University of Alabama, and they know when good plays are good and bad plays are bad. It is going to be exciting. They know LSU is consistently one of the great teams in America. So Alabama is doing pretty well: Eight and zero, their all-star defense is No. 1 in scoring and No. 1 in total defenses. They also have their No. 1 rushing defense in the country, allowing only 44 yards per game, a historic number that ranks better than Alabama's national championship game in 1992 and the undefeated and untied 1966 team. So it is going to be a special time. Our university is a great university. The University of Alabama has been growing in strength for years now. It has one of the greatest presidents in America: Dr. Robert D. Witt, who was my high school classmate, and Judy Bonner is the provost there, sister of Congressman Jo Bonner. So it is an exciting time in Alabama in general. Academically and otherwise, the University of Alabama is doing great-- one of its best years in its history. I wish to also point out and thank the LSU fans and chefs John Folse and Rick Tramonto, along with Bob Baumhower and Steve Zucker from Alabama, for sponsoring the LouisiBama Gumbo Bowl to benefit tornado victims in Tuscaloosa. That shows true class in both of the schools' fan base. For all the talk going on this week, I hope to see the kind of respect this partnership indicates among all our fans. While I don't think it will happen, should Les Miles and his team somehow manage to get out of Tuscaloosa with a victory, I would love to treat Senator Vitter and Senator Landrieu to some of the finest gulf seafood there is, healthy and straight from the Gulf of Mexico, which my colleague knows is fresher and cleaner and finer than it ever has been, and maybe we could garnish it with some of the best grass that marks the field at Bryant Denny Stadium. I understand Les Miles is a fan. I would also be more than happy to bring my friend, Senator Vitter, an Alabama tie on the Monday after the game, which I think would look good if he were to wear it on the floor of the Senate.

Mr. SESSIONS. I thank Senator Vitter for his friendship and good service in the Senate. We work on so many things together. But college football is special, and I think the game this weekend will be one of the great games in college history. I am so excited about it. I know the fans in both our States, and throughout the country, are excited about it.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I thank the Republican leader for his comments and would just say that the time we can borrow from the future to spend today in order to create some sort of sugar high that creates jobs is past. We have tried that. The debt has now reached a level where the debt itself is a threat to our economy. It is a cloud over our economy. It is slowing growth and job creation. I truly believe that. We need to move out of these difficult financial times we are in, but I think the debt itself now is a threat to us. I wish to speak about the minibus appropriations bill that is before the body and its effect on the budget we have. As the ranking Republican on the Budget Committee, I do believe it is my responsibility to present, as I am able, a straightforward, honest figure about the spending bills that come before our Senate. H.R. 2112 is the first of several minibus bills that apparently will be used in lieu of the normal appropriations process. This minibus is so named because it contains three appropriation bills put in one--not one as we normally see before the Senate: the Agriculture bill, Commerce-Justice-Science, and the Transportation and Housing bill, all cobbled together in one. The Democratic majority contends this package will save taxpayers money, but this is just more Washington accounting. We have crunched the numbers and discovered that these bills will not cut spending but will actually increase spending by $10 billion over last year. So I wish to take a moment to explain because this is very important. We had an agreement that we would begin the smallest of reductions this year in spending--not nearly enough, but we reached that agreement, and we should honor that at least. So this is the first appropriations bill the Senate has considered after the discretionary spending caps were established as part of the recent debt limit negotiations. The Budget Control Act, as you remember, was passed to raise the debt ceiling. As an exchange for agreeing to raise the debt ceiling, as President Obama asked, Congress insisted that there be some curtailment of spending so we wouldn't hit the debt ceiling again so soon. So the Budget Control Act, as the bill was pretentiously named in August, requires that discretionary spending be brought down this year from $1,050 billion to $1,043 billion in fiscal year 2012, an alleged total spending reduction of a paltry $7 billion throughout the entire year. Presumably, the other $6 billion that was required to be saved under this agreement will be saved in other bills to come before the Congress. We haven't seen them yet. Does the bill that is before us move us toward even this minor goal? That is the question. The majority party says it does. They contend that the bill, the minibus, spends $128 billion--which is $1 billion less than last year when it was $129 billion--a reduction of less than 10 percent, and they are very proud of this. But, remember, as an aside, nondefense discretionary spending alone in the first 2 years of President Obama's Presidency went up 24 percent. So to take a $1 billion reduction is basically to hold in place this surge in spending at a time when this Nation has never, ever faced such a severe debt threat to its future. Going through the bill and thinking it through, the Budget Control Act also created a new category of spending. The Budget Control Act, if you remember, was cobbled together in the dead of night and brought up on the floor on the eve of a financial crisis and it was demanded that it be passed, and hardly anyone had a chance to read it. Unknown to most of us, it allowed spending above the $1,043 billion limit for disaster assistance. The debt limit deal provided an allowance for disaster spending equal to the average of the 10 prior years of disaster spending, which can be assessed or spent simply by providing the proper words in the appropriations bills that come forward across the floor, as these three do. But the majority contends this money should magically not be counted when you decide how much is spent by the bill. Why? Well, it is a disaster, and disaster spending doesn't count. Don't you know? As amended on the Senate floor 2 weeks ago, the bill now contains $3.2 billion in new spending above the caps for disaster relief, a further increase of 20 percent to the disaster assistance. Two additional amendments were adopted last week adding to the amount that the committees had produced as disaster assistance. While there are arguments that the $3.2 billion should not be counted as an expenditure, the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, our official scorekeeper, includes it as an expenditure. It is included as an expenditure in the CBO score, $3.2 billion. No one has challenged them because it appears they are plainly correct to count the $3.2 billion as spending. Only in Washington can it be asserted that the government can spend $3.2 billion and it not count. The bill's sponsors contend that the discretionary spending portion of the bill, as I indicated, has gone down from $129 billion to $128 billion, but CBO says it went up to $131 billion. The disaster funding represents a 2-percent discretionary increase, at a time when spending is supposed to be going down. Further, the bill's sponsors say you should not count the mandatory spending programs that are contained in the bill. They insist that mandatory spending is not under the control of the appropriators. Again, this is logic that only exists in Washington. In truth, it is not unusual for the Appropriations Committee to take actions that impact mandatory programs, and it can be done. But, of course, it was not in this bill. For example, food stamps, the largest mandatory program by far in this bill--actually larger than any other program in the bill--amounts to 75 percent of total Agriculture appropriations spending. Seventy- five percent. Most people think agriculture programs are bailing out farmers. Those benefits to farmers have been reduced steadily over the years. Now 75 percent of the Agriculture bill is the mandatory programs, food stamps being the largest. And this program, under the legislation before us today, is set to increase by 14 percent next year, $10 billion more than last year, a $10 billion increase in the Food Stamp Program. But that doesn't count, it is contended. This spending increase results in a doubling of the food stamp budget over the past 3 years--doubling the budget in 3 years--and then quadrupling it four times over the last 10 years. We have got to look under the hood of this program and find out what is happening to it. But nothing is seriously being done. Like welfare reform, responsible changes to the way government operates this program will improve outcomes, help more needy people achieve the goal of financial independence, not dependence, and stop fraud, which most Americans know is pretty common in the Food Stamp Program. When I offered an amendment to save a modest $10 billion over the next 10 years, a reform that would not have reduced eligibility for any of the needy but only require that the recipients meet the minimum legal requirements of the program--actually be needy and qualify for the program by reducing fraud and abuse--the amendment was defeated right here on the floor of the Senate. It would have saved $10 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office, by making sure that people make actual, formal applications for their food stamps and sign a document saying they actually qualify for it. Is that too much to ask? Senator Stabenow, the agriculture authorizing committee chair, rose to explain that we are not to worry because, while we are increasing food stamp funding now, at some other time her committee will recommend and produce a bill perhaps that will reduce it by $23 billion over 10 years. But if that promise were to be fulfilled, the effect on the fiscal year 2012 budget would be that food stamp spending would increase this year approximately $8 billion--or a 10-percent increase-- rather than $10 billion, a 14-percent increase. The program has indeed doubled since 2008. But now we are hearing in reports that this $23 billion in savings is not even in the Food Stamp Program, or most of it is not. We are hearing that 19 percent of it is a further reduction of aid to farmers, and only $4 billion of the reduction in savings would be from food stamps. Here is the bottom line. When discretionary and mandatory spending are scored in this bill, the overall spending compared to last year went up by $10 billion, or a 4-percent increase, not a cut. Relative to the amount Senators approved for these three bills last year, we are being asked to increase spending, not decrease spending. I believe that is a fair and honest analysis of the bill that is before us. If you were to exclude the mandatory spending, ignore that huge increase in the Food Stamp Program, the SNAP program, and even say disaster assistance should be ignored, the so-called reduction in spending would be only a paltry $1 billion on these three bills combined. It is time to get serious. Denial in this Congress must end. You can't borrow your way out of debt. We are spending money we do not have. Forty cents of every dollar we spend is borrowed, on which we pay interest every year. It is digging us deeper in a hole. It cannot be contended that this is serious work toward reducing our deficit. It just cannot be. Our deficit in fiscal year 2011, which ended September 30, was just shy of $1,300 billion. A spending cut of $7 billion for this year is a mere pittance in comparison. In no way is it even close to a significant reduction of the projected deficit we are going to have in this fiscal year, which began October 1. We are now at Halloween. We still haven't passed the appropriations bill for the year we are in. Congress is not performing responsibly. It is not. We haven't had a budget in over 900 days. The majority leader, Senator Reid, said it would be foolish to have a budget. No wonder the American people are unhappy with us. How can this be? We are responsible people. We are proposing to spend next year $1,043 billion, and act as though we are proud to have reduced the spending by $7 billion when we will have over $1,000 billion in debt, $1 trillion plus, next year? But it gets worse. The bill also contains a number of Washington accounting tricks to sweep new spending under the rug. It is full of the typical gimmicks used to shove more spending into a bill that has already reached its spending limit. We have reached our limit. I remain amazed at the creativity used by spenders to defeat budget limits. Were they to use such creativity to control spending, would we not be so much better off? I have already talked about the new authority granted by the Budget Control Act to designate an item as a disaster outside and above the budget--it doesn't count if you call it a disaster--and to spend the money without a formal vote by the Senate to declare it a disaster. Indeed, until the Budget Control Act passed, you had to have 60 votes to declare something a disaster to go above the budget. That has been eliminated. That was changed in this Budget Control Act that reduced control of the budget. It reduced the power of the budget to contain spending by eliminating this end run. At least you used to have 60 votes to spend above the budget by calling it a disaster. Now you do not. When they first floated this idea that they were going to put disaster spending in the budget and it was going to be averaged out with what we normally spend, I thought that was a good idea. We know on average we have been spending this much for disasters. Let's put it in the budget and only spend above that if it meets that standard we have traditionally had. The idea was to arrange the amount of disaster spending and put it in the budget, but in the shell game that is Washington, that is not what the fine print did. The Budget Control Act establishes in effect now a slush fund to spend money above the budget limits, eliminating the 60-vote requirement for emergency designation. There is $3.2 billion in spending under this new authority that is in this bill, the first of multiple minibuses we will see. At the rate we are going, the ceiling of $11.3 billion for disaster established under the Budget Control Act will be exhausted and more emergency spending will be needed to further address legitimate disaster needs, but there will be no need for 60 votes to do so. That vote has been eliminated. In addition, the bill uses another gimmick to rescind discretionary appropriations provided in prior years that, for one reason or another, can no longer be spent for their intended purposes. That is, the bill rescinds budget authority that CBO estimates will not result in any cash savings over the next 10 years. Rather than letting the appropriations lapse and saving this money and being thankful we got the project done at less than normal, less than the projected cost, this bill, as has been done before, pretends to be responsible and rescinds that money which is then used to pay for the spending that will in fact result in cash expenditures from the Treasury. This one gimmick in this bill would add $131 million in off-the-books spending. Finally, the bill finds savings in mandatory programs that game the government's cashflow and score as savings for this bill, but does not actually reduce the cost to the taxpayers. These so-called CHIMPS--we have a name for it now, changes in mandatory program spending--total $8.5 billion in this bill. Of that amount, an astonishing 88 percent, or $7.5 billion, results in no net spending reduction over 10 years. Some of these CHIMPS have been going on year after year. One example is the Crime Victims Fund. Every year Congress says that the crime victims will get the funds they are due under the law next year which, unfortunately for the Crime Victims Fund, has not yet arrived since the annual deferral began in fiscal year 2000. In other words, it is done every year and there seems to be no prospect that this will not continue. Meanwhile, the appropriators get the amount deferred over and over again, enabling ever higher amounts of discretionary spending. It would be like a family delaying a single $500 home repair for 10 years, and then counting it as $5,000 in savings, $500 for every year the repair did not take place. In this case, over the past 3 years the gimmick used in this bill has enabled $14 billion in higher spending.

Mr. SESSIONS. I thank the Chair and ask for 1 additional minute to close.

Mr. SESSIONS. I am unable to support this bill. By its own standards it fails. It represents everything that is wrong with Washington today. It crams three bills, which should have been considered individually, into one, creating a process that curtails debate on spending at a time when we need more debate, not less. Further, it does virtually nothing to address the fiscal crisis threatening this country. It treats spending caps established earlier this summer as the most that can be saved, not as the starting point for savings, and then uses gimmicks to spend over and above that advertised limit. It is not a serious response to the explosive growth in Federal spending and falls short of the commitment we must make to handle taxpayer dollars honestly and responsibly. It is business as usual. The American people deserve better. I yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

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

Mr. SESSIONS. Madam President, I want to take a minute to say I am pleased that one of my amendments to eliminate the categorical eligibility for food stamps concept has been called up. I also look forward to calling up an amendment that's been referred to as the Medco amendment, which has real strong bipartisan support. It was an amendment that many people felt they needed to vote against when the patent bill came forward because they believed the bill would then be required to go back to the House. So, it failed on a 51-to-47 vote. But I am confident that there is an overwhelming number who would prefer to vote for this amendment now, if we can get it accepted. It would not take a long time for us to consider it. I think it's an issue our members are familiar with. So I want to share my thoughts that it is very important to me, and I think perhaps it might have a majority vote on both sides of the aisle. Basically, my amendment would say we want to prohibit the PTO from using any funds to implement a provision of the patent reform bill that would have the effect of deciding an ongoing civil litigation that is on appeal now to the court of appeals. The merits of the matter are being argued. I believe it is the kind of matter that clearly should be allowed to stand in the courts. But this law firm that apparently failed to follow the statute of limitations--and the courts ruled in their favor--is seeking to have the Congress overrule or shortcut the appellate process in this matter. I wanted to say I look forward to debating the question of categorical eligibility for food stamps, where if you are approved for a number of other Federal programs, you don't have to make a formal application to qualify for food stamps. CBO has indicated that it could save as much as $10 billion over 10 years if that hole in the program is closed. And I would note that food stamps are the fastest growing major item in the budget by far. There is nothing close to it. It has doubled in the last 3 years. It has gone from $20 billion to $80 billion in the last 4 years, a 400-percent increase. One in seven people are now receiving food stamps. Originally, it was 1 in 50 when the program started. Nobody wants to deny people food, but the program has not been looked at. We have not looked under the hood. I believe in this one reform that says if you want to get thousands of dollars in food benefits from the government, you ought to at least fill out a form and qualify according to the standards the Food and Nutrition Service sets. That is basically all it would do. Some of the programs, if you qualify for them, are now automatically accepting food stamp recipients. They have a lower qualification than food stamps do. For example, one person won the lottery and that was counted as an asset to the person rather than income to the person. He called and said: Do I still get food stamps, since I won a $2 million lottery? They said: Yes, the money you received is an asset, and we don't count assets under this other mechanism. But they should count assets under the Food Stamp Program. I thank the Chair, and I thank the Senator from Delaware, who is moving the bill and allowing me to share these thoughts. I do hope we can get agreement and move forward on the Medco amendment, along with the categorical food stamp amendment.

Mr. SESSIONS. Excuse me.

Mr. SESSIONS. I think that is basically correct.

Mr. SESSIONS. Fair enough. I just wanted, for the record, to indicate I was urging our leadership to make this matter pending. I thank the Senator.

Mr. SESSIONS. I thank the Chair. She is correct. She has allowed the food stamp amendment to be pending, and I am talking with staff on this side and the Senator from Maryland is not objecting at this point to that amendment. So I hope that will happen. I just wished to emphasize that there are a number of Members who feel very strongly that this is a matter we have an opportunity now to fix; that is, we shouldn't be moving forward to intervene in an ongoing lawsuit. Under our rules, there is a way to get a special relief act, if somehow there is a miscarriage of justice that occurs in our American system--an individual special relief act. But it has certain procedures, and one of the key prerequisites of that is that your litigation must be exhausted. Then, if the courts can't give you relief, we might consider it under certain procedures. So this litigation is ongoing, and that is why I am hopeful we can fix it.

Mr. SESSIONS. No, I am talking----

Mr. SESSIONS. No, the Medco amendment. It was voted on in the House twice, and on the second vote the amendment passed by a narrow margin. Our Members did not want to amend the House bill, even though many opposed that particular amendment. So this would give us an opportunity to vote on it, and it would be germane.

Mr. SESSIONS

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I thank the distinguished assistant majority leader for his comments. And I will disagree, but I think we could agree, because my proposal is not to cut off anybody who ought to receive food stamps. My proposal wouldn't cut off any benefits to anybody who deserves food stamps. My proposal would not cut off anybody who qualifies for food stamps. It would say that just because you complied with the requirement for TANF or you complied with the requirement for LIHEAP or you sought assistance for some family planning issue, that those don't automatically qualify you. I don't think it is too much to ask someone who would be given thousands of dollars over a period of time in food stamps to fill out a form. That form would say what your income is and what your assets are. And if you have substantial assets that are higher than the food stamp law allows, you should not get it. So I don't believe this proposal does anything but help tighten up the act. I don't believe it is too much to ask that somebody fill out a form to demonstrate they are qualified before they receive free money from the U.S. Government for the purchase of food, and certainly I would emphasize that dramatically. I don't think the Senator disagrees that any program in the U.S. Government of any real size has surged faster than this program has. It has gone up, since 2010, $20 billion. In 2009 or so, unemployment hit 9.8 percent. It is now 9.1. It is too high, and people need food stamps and they should get them. And perhaps there are more people out there who qualify even than in 2009, or whenever our unemployment hit almost 10 percent. Maybe there are more people today. I don't know. But I don't think there are huge numbers more. You go from $59 billion to $79 billion, that is about a 38- or 40-percent increase in 2 years in this program. One of the reasons is we have made people automatically eligible. So if you are eligible for any of these programs, you have received any assistance, you may not have even filled out a form that has anything like the same qualifications that the Food Stamp Act requires, you are automatically, categorically, qualified. The Congressional Budget Office says if this change in the law that happened recently were to be eliminated, it would save $10 billion over 10 years. It would not reduce food stamps; it would just reduce a little bit the growth in food stamps. The $10 billion over 10 years represents $1 billion a year in the first year. It would be less than that, according to the score we have seen. But let's say in the first year that this program reduced spending by $1 billion, that is $1 billion out of the proposed $79 billion. So we are expecting to spend $79 billion this year, and we would only spend $78 billion. But that adds up over time. And food stamps need to be looked at across the board much more carefully, because we don't have that many more people who are in poverty today than we have had. But we have many more people receiving food stamps. I would stress that this year's increase in food stamps by another 14 percent is not an acceptable figure, because we know that there are problems within the program. Amendment No. 753 Mr. President, I wish to say one thing briefly about Senator Ayotte's proposal on terrorism prosecution. As a Federal prosecutor for almost 15 years, I truly believe she is correct on this issue. It is something we have been debating in Congress for a long time. Congress has made clear its view about it. I would simply say this. The Presiding Officer is a former Attorney General. But if you make the presumption that an individual who is arrested is to be tried in article III courts, even though they are an enemy combatant against the United States, against the laws of war, an unlawful enemy combatant, those individuals should be treated as warriors and they should be treated as enemies of the country, and they should be arrested and detained, and presumptively in military custody. This is the tradition of the United States from its founding. This is worldwide accepted law. And I do believe we need to understand the reason this is important. An individual who is arrested attacking the United States and who is going to be tried in a Federal court must be given Miranda warnings before they are interrogated, must be provided a lawyer, must be promptly taken before a U.S. magistrate, must be provided discovery in the government's case, and must have a public hearing. You don't do that for people who are at war with you.

Mr. SESSIONS. I would yield.

Mr. SESSIONS. That is a very important question. This individual perhaps looks like he just fell off a turnip truck or something. He was not a very solid person and he decided to plead guilty, and that was good. Many of these individuals are very tough, very clever, very devious. They have, we know for a fact, used the civil justice system to find discovery against us, how we discover their activities, what kind of surveillance techniques we use, and made the trials dangerous places and have made the trials showcases. So I think that just because one individual decided to plead guilty, it has no bearing on the overall principle that if you arrest people on the battlefield, they are not required to be taken immediately to a judge and given a lawyer.

Mr. SESSIONS. I will be pleased to.

Mr. SESSIONS. The Senator is so correct. We went through a number of actions. The Supreme Court found the law inadequate, and Congress responded to the Supreme Court's concerns and passed clear laws that are certainly adequate within the Constitution as described by the Supreme Court. We now have an entire system set up to meet the Supreme Court's concerns about the trial of these individuals. It is safe. It is secure. It is consistent with Supreme Court requirements and international law.

Mr. SESSIONS. Absolutely correct. I think Senator Ayotte really reached out to Members of this Senate to make sure they knew there was an option to do it another way, and it does provide the President that option. With regard to the FBI and their involvement, they are a great investigative agency. If they participate in the arrest of one of these individuals and they were turned over to the military, the FBI can still work with the military to investigate the case. It would just be tried under military commissions according to the lawful system Congress, in a bipartisan way, passed several years ago.

Mr. SESSIONS. That is a very good question. Under the law of the United States, if you are to interrogate an individual who has been taken into custody, the police have to give them Miranda rights before they interrogate them. As long as that person is in custody, if you are going to try them in a civilian court--and Director Mueller of the FBI, in response to questions I asked him, acknowledged that if you are going to try the person in the civilian courts and you conduct interrogation, you must give them Miranda warnings.

Mr. SESSIONS. There have been suggestions that somehow the terrorist cases would allow the interrogation to go on a few hours, but I have not seen any real authority that would justify that. The clear Miranda standard for any police officer in America is that if you arrest someone, before you ask them questions, they must have been given their Miranda rights. That is the rule in the trial of any Federal court. I think it would be very dangerous to assume the court is going to give some extraordinary new rights that they have never indicated they would.

Mr. SESSIONS. I thank the Senator, the Republican leader, for his good questions. I would just say I think Senator Ayotte has worked very hard on this amendment. She herself is a skilled prosecutor. I believe the legislation would be helpful to us. I will just say that as a matter of policy, you can be absolutely sure it will be more difficult to prosecute a case, more likely to complicate matters significantly, if they are given Miranda warnings, if they are given lawyers, if they are brought publicly before a judge--perhaps revealing to the other coconspirators the fact that you have been arrested before they can be apprehended. It would cause many more difficulties than are necessary. Of all people we ought not to give extra rights to, it would be terrorists bent on killing and maiming innocent Americans. I yield the floor.

Mr. SESSIONS

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

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I note the absence of a quorum.