Politics & Power Quote by Lucille Roybal-Allard

Roybal-Allard’s line works like a political balancing act performed in real time: it promises safety and freedom in the same breath, insisting the two don’t have to trade places after a national trauma. The specific intent is reassurance with conditions. If we “allow law enforcement to do their work” and “give them adequate resources and modern technologies,” then protection follows - and crucially, it can happen “without intruding on our liberties.” It’s a clean syllogism designed for a post-9/11 electorate anxious about another attack and uneasy about what the government might do to prevent it.

The subtext is where the argument sharpens. “Free of political interference” quietly frames oversight as meddling, hinting that scrutiny - congressional, judicial, media - can be partisan noise rather than democratic accountability. At the same time, “modern technologies” is a euphemism doing a lot of work: surveillance tools, data sharing, expanded intelligence capacities. Naming them directly would trigger the very liberty concerns the sentence tries to preempt.

The context matters because “the lessons of September 11” became a rhetorical passkey in Washington, a way to make exceptional policy feel like common sense. This quote participates in that moment’s bipartisan grammar: invest, empower, streamline. The craft is in the final clause, which functions less as a proven claim than as a permission slip. It asks the public to trust that expanded capacity won’t become expanded reach - a promise the post-Patriot Act era would keep testing.