mr. chairman , i thank the gentleman for yielding time .  mr. chairman , i suspect that the american people do not realize just how much the process of legislating is about reacting to events that take place around us .  when something like enron happens , we react to that .  when accounting scandals happen , we react to it .  when the events of 9/11 occurred , we obviously reacted to those events .  and quite often when we react , we are looking for an appropriate new balance that takes into account some outrageous activity that took place .  and so when we passed the patriot act originally , our effort was to try to find a new security balance for people here in our country , and we thought we had done a tremendous job of doing that in the judiciary committee , only to find that the rules committee , which did not even have any jurisdiction over the matter or had any hearings about the matter , took the bill , rewrote it , brought it to the floor and struck a completely different balance between the rights of government on one hand and law enforcement and the rights of individuals on the other hand .  i voted against the original patriot act , and i still believe that the balance that was struck in that bill was inappropriate .  i think the balance that we have struck in this bill is not the appropriate balance .  and a number of my colleagues have said that , well , there have not been any abuses by law enforcement of the powers that we gave them .  but the truth of the matter is that depends on how you define an abuse .  and i do not like to define an abuse as something outrageous .  if we wait on something outrageous to happen , then we will react back in the opposite direction of against government and law enforcement in unreasonable ways , just as we are reacting in favor of law enforcement now .  so here are a couple of statistics that you need to know about : the american library association found that libraries have received over 200 formal and informal requests for materials including 49 requests from federal officers .  well , maybe they did not find anything .  maybe that was not an abuse that people are going to get outraged about , but i think that is outrageous .  in section 213 it talks about sneak-and-peek searches .  in a letter to the gentleman from virginia ( mr. scott )  , the department of justice said on july 5 , 2005 that that section had been used 153 times as of january 2005 .  only 18 of those times were the uses for terrorism investigations .  well , what is happening with the other 80 percent is in my estimation an abuse of this provision because we passed the law so that we could make it easier for law enforcement to get to terrorists .  the law is being used in ways that , but for the events of 9/11 and the terrorism that occurred , we would not have accepted as residents of this country .  i just think we have struck the wrong balance .  we need to sunset this bill again for a shorter period of time , and i hope my colleagues will take that into account and vote against it .  