Justice & Law Quote by Mike Pence

“In the last four years under the Patriot Act” is doing the heavy lifting here, because it quietly rewrites a controversial emergency measure as a settled scoreboard. Pence anchors the claim in a tidy time frame that suggests measurable progress, not a rolling expansion of state power. It’s the language of “look at the results,” designed to short-circuit the more uncomfortable question: results at what cost, and for whom?

The key phrase is “a great increase in the ability.” It’s bureaucratic and bloodless, which is the point. “Ability” sounds like capacity, competence, modernization. It avoids the spikier nouns critics use - surveillance, intrusion, dragnet - and it sidesteps any direct mention of Americans’ privacy or constitutional constraints. The sentence is also carefully depersonalized: “law enforcement officials” aren’t agents with incentives and blind spots; they’re neutral professionals. And “investigate and track terrorists” smuggles in a moral veto. If the subject is “terrorists,” dissent can be made to sound like naivete or indulgence.

Context matters: in the mid-2000s, Patriot Act debates were a proxy war between post-9/11 security politics and civil-liberties anxiety, with looming sunset provisions and reauthorization fights. Pence’s intent is coalition maintenance - reassuring voters that the government is competent and vigilant, while normalizing extraordinary powers as common-sense tools. The subtext is a trade offer: accept broader investigative authority as the price of safety, and treat skepticism as an obstacle rather than oversight.