Statement of U.S. Senator Russ Feingold At the Senate Judiciary Committee Markup On the Patriot Act Reauthorization July 21, 2005 Mr. Chairman, I want to say a few words about this bill and about the compromise that was worked out late last night. Thanks in large part to your leadership, I believe the end result of the negotiations process has been a positive one -- and one that I can support. As introduced, your bill made progress in the right direction. I appreciated that you drafted reauthorization legislation that made improvements to existing law, and that did not contain the most troublesome expansions of the Patriot Act that we have seen in some other proposals. But I could not have supported your bill without additional changes on the key issues that I and others have been concerned about. The compromise that you laid out last night does not address everything that I would have liked to have seen revised in this bill. Nor am I happy with some of the changes made in response to requests from some of my colleagues on the other side of the room. But the compromise does address the core concerns that I and others have had about the standard for Section 215 orders, about sneak and peek search warrants, and about meaningful judicial review of Section 215 orders and National Security Letters, including judicial review of the gag rule. It does not go as far on any of these issues as the SAFE Act does, but it does make meaningful changes to current law. Mr. Chairman, I will join the members of this Committee in reporting this bill to the floor in its current form. It is not a perfect bill from my point of view, but it is a good bill. It addresses a number of the concerns that I have been talking about since October 2001 when the Senate first considered the Patriot Act on the floor. We have come a long way since that night, and I am grateful for your efforts to listen to and try to deal with the civil liberties concerns that have been raised both here in the Senate and around the country. I want to be clear that this will not be the end of my efforts to further fix the Patriot Act. This bipartisan compromise takes a big step in the right direction, and I am pleased that I can support it, but I will continue to push for additional changes to the law. Also, just let me add one word of caution. In 2001, the House Judiciary Committee reached a bipartisan agreement on a version of the Patriot Act. Every member of that Committee, spanning a huge swath of the ideological spectrum voted for that bill. But when the bill went to the floor, the House leadership took up a very different bill. The Committee got rolled. It is my strong hope that this bipartisan effort doesn't suffer a similar fate. We know that the House bill being considered today is very different from this one. And our own Intelligence Committee also reported a very different bill. We need to fight for this bill and I hope that if we work together we can succeed.

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