Politics & Power Quote by Lucille Roybal-Allard

Roybal-Allard’s line is built like a warning label: the product is “public safety,” the side effects are civil liberties, and the dosage is whatever fear can justify. The key move is her “Even though” concession, which nods to the post-9/11 consensus without submitting to it. She grants the premise that terrorism is real and urgent, then pivots to the quieter emergency: what a government will do when it learns that panic lowers the public’s tolerance for dissent, privacy, and due process.

The phrase “some in our government” is doing political work. It isolates the impulse to curtail rights as a choice made by identifiable actors, not an unavoidable law of nature. That matters because the most effective rights rollbacks are marketed as inevitabilities: We have no choice, we’re at war, extraordinary times. Roybal-Allard’s subtext is that the “name of fighting terrorism” becomes a rhetorical blank check, a magic phrase that turns controversial policies - surveillance, detention, secrecy - into civic obligations.

She also reframes the central question. Instead of arguing tactics (Will this program stop an attack?), she argues costs (What are we becoming as we try?). That’s not softness; it’s accountability. In the early 2000s, debates over the Patriot Act, expanded intelligence powers, and “security theater” often treated liberty as a luxury item. Roybal-Allard insists it’s the baseline, and that compromises don’t just happen - they accumulate, normalize, and outlast the crisis that supposedly required them.