You know. under the underlying bill we had open hearings. we had closed hearings. we looked at a lot of the details and openly debated them and I thought we were making pretty good progress. But then. in the selfenacting rule. we have a whole bunch of new language that is dumped into this bill that has had no hearings. In fact. section 18 says in this bill now. no rights under the RESTORE Act for undocumented aliens. It says: This Act shall not be construed to prohibit surveillance of an alien not permitted to be in the United States. Undocumented aliens. no rights. Then we get to what. the rights that the terrorists have in the underlying bill. Section 3 has procedures for authorizing acquisitions of communications. and there are 8 pages telling how we are going to protect the terrorists. They have got some rights protected under this bill. Then we get to section 4. the emergency authorization. We have 8 more pages explaining how terrorists have more rights than undocumented aliens right here in the United States. So then we listened to the gentleman from California . who is the former Attorney General of the State of California. and he explains that. through the minimization procedures. that we are actually giving terrorists more rights than we do our own U.S. common criminals. So what is the deal with this? It is really a mess. You have got terrorists at a higher status than undocumented aliens that are here in America and a lot of them just trying to make a living. and then you have got a higher standard for terrorists than you do for our own criminals. Now. why dont we balance things out here? Why dont we balance things out?
Keywords matched
Undocumented undocumented