When I arrived in Congress in January 2007, I cast a vote that I shouldn't have had a chance to cast.

The president's and his congressional allies' sole political strategy over the previous two campaign cycles had been using the horrific events of September 11, 2001 to scare voters into lining up behind them and question the patriotism of all who disagreed with them.

Yet for all their talk about 9/11, they dragged their feet on implementing the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission.

They refused to implement the recommendations of the 9/11 that would properly protect the nation, creating genuine security rather than just an illusion of it.  Enacting the Commission's recommendations was one of the top priorities of the Democratic Congress that took control in January 2007. We made it a part of the "First 100 Hours" initiative, we hit the ground running, and we passed it.

I'm proud to have cast the vote that I did, but it should not have been up to me. That vote should have been cast long before I made it to Washington, D.C.  I had to vote in 2007 to enact security recommendations that were made in 2004.

Since taking office, I have been working on ways to provide more funding for the first responders who serve as our first line of defense in the event that we face another cataclysm like 9/11. Many first responders died that day. Many wouldn't have if their repeated requests for communications equipment been answered. We cannot just say "never again" about the attacks, as more attacks are certainly possible. Those who would harm Americans can fail as many times as they need to, for they only need to succeed once. We must learn and better adapt so that more of the heroes that respond to an emergency get to watch their children grow up.

In early 2008, a TSA employee whose job it is to test the screeners made it through airport security at Tampa International Airport with a fake bomb strapped to his back. We were fortunate that it was a tester and not a terrorist intent on killing innocent American people. But at the same time, it emphasizes the necessary improvements to our airport security screening.

We must strive to improve all of our security standards. Vince Lombardi famously said "The best offense is a good defense". We must improve standards until stories like the one in Tampa are a thing of the past.

At the same time, we must be mindful of our civil liberties. "Those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither," as Benjamin Franklin once said. We've all heard the horror stories. A mother was forced to drink her own breast milk to prove it wasn't an explosive. A sick child was endangered because the screeners forced him to open his sterile feeding tube to prove it's not an explosive. We can never allow the United States to devolve into a police state in the name of security. And as your Congressman and a member of the Judiciary Committee, I pledge that I will always look for a way to balance our civil liberties and our security, addressing both while decaying neither.