Politics & Power Quote by Peter Camejo

Camejo’s line hits with the blunt force of a civics lesson delivered as indictment: don’t dress up power grabs as “security,” because the rules are supposed to be the rules. The repetition of “It was, it is” strips the Patriot Act of any plausible deniability that time, fear, or bureaucratic normalization might grant. He’s not arguing about policy preferences; he’s arguing about legitimacy. Calling it “illegal” is meant to yank the debate out of the familiar Washington spectrum of “tough vs. soft on terror” and into a more destabilizing frame: a government that acts outside its authority is not simply misguided, it’s rogue.

The subtext is a warning about how emergencies get laundered into permanence. Post-9/11 politics sold speed as virtue and secrecy as competence. Camejo refuses that emotional trade, insisting the Constitution isn’t a mood, it’s a boundary. His emphasis on “the Congress, the Senate and the president” is pointed: he names the whole respectable machine, anticipating the common defense that broad bipartisan support equals moral cover. In his formulation, consensus doesn’t sanctify; it incriminates.

Context matters because the Patriot Act arrived in a moment when dissent was often treated as suspicious, even disloyal. Camejo’s stance leverages an older American rhetorical weapon: constitutional originalism as a language of resistance, not reaction. For a businessman-turned-politician with outsider instincts, it’s also a populist move - repositioning the “little guy” as the true constitutionalist and the governing class as the reckless innovator.