DEMOCRATS in charge of Congress have a clear choice before them when they reconvene the House today: Will they act immediately to close significant gaps in America’s intelligence capability – or not?
Ten days ago, their leaders chose to adjourn the House of Representatives without passing a Senate-approved anti-terror bill that had overwhelming bipartisan support. As a result, Democrats left America at significant risk and potentially blind to new terrorist plots.
The Democrats’ dereliction of duty left our intelligence community without critical, 21st-century intelligence tools for unearthing those plots. Until the House passes this bill, our agencies are bound by the overly bureaucratic Vietnam-era law known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
FISA was in effect on 9/11, too. A bipartisan congressional inquiry into why our nation was blindsided by those attacks later concluded that “difficulties with the FISA process led to a diminished level of coverage of suspected al Qaeda operatives in the United States.”
One of the main contributors to that report was none other than Nancy Pelosi – now the speaker of the House.
Yet since then, intelligence professionals and leaders in both parties have asked Speaker Pelosi to cooperate in modernizing the FISA law and putting our intelligence collection methods on a surer footing – and she has instead opted for stalling tactics and partisan rhetoric.
In the days before Presidents Day weekend, with the clock ticking on the temporary law that gave our intelligence officials the tools they need, the Senate passed a good, bipartisan piece of legislation that puts the failed, pre-9/11 FISA process behind us.
Senators passed it by a margin of more than 2-1 – no easy feat in this era of partisan gridlock. Democrats in the Pelosi-led House responded by putting the Senate bill in a drawer.
They did so knowing full well that – if allowed to come up for a vote – the bill would pass in the House with the same bipartisan stamp of approval it got in the Senate.
So, when the clock struck midnight on Saturday, Feb. 16, the temporary law we had put in place expired.
Speaker Pelosi’s top lieutenants were perfectly content, if not serene, about their decision to put our nation’s security at risk. Her No. 2, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, declared on the House floor that “there is no urgency.” And Rep. Silvestre Reyes, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, told reporters that “things will be fine.”
Reyes’ Senate counterpart, John Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), was not so willing to give this critical issue the brush-off. On the floor of the Senate, Rockefeller had said that “the quality of the intelligence that we are going to be receiving is going to be degraded” if the bill did not become law before the interim measure expired.
The bipartisan bill that Sen. Rockefeller and his panel authored, and 67 of his colleagues joined him in supporting, would make a fine law. It includes the vital tools our intelligence officials need to track in real time the movements of those who would seek to do us harm and kill untold innocents.
The Senate bill also contains common-sense legal protections for telecommunications companies that assisted the nation in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
These companies did for their fellow citizens what any patriotic American would do if asked to help bring to justice the terrorists responsible for plotting the deaths of thousands of innocents on American soil. But now they face a barrage of big-dollar lawsuits over their actions.
The 66 trial lawyers behind those suits have given $1.5 million in campaign contributions to congressional Democrats – and those lawyers want the Senate’s bipartisan compromise killed so that their cases can proceed.
It’s pretty clear why House Democrats have refused to take up the Senate bill: Facing intense lobbying pressure from their political patrons, they’ve put the interests of trial lawyers before a bipartisan bill to effectively combat terrorism.
House Democrats face a stark choice: They can continue on the political course they have embraced – or they can prove that their complacency was but a momentary lapse of judgment, and give the bipartisan Senate bill the up-or-down vote it deserves.
Rep. Adam Putnam (R-Fla.) is chairman of the House Republican Conference.