They don't agree on much — but the tea party and the NAACP are aligned on this issue: "We want our government to stop spying on innocent Americans," officials from both groups have declared.
In an op-ed commentary in
the Raleigh News & Observer, Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder and national coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots, and Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP Washington Bureau, write that reform of the Patriot Act is "not enough," calling for "a broad overhaul of the government’s surveillance powers."
"Our intelligence agencies say they need these powers to combat terrorism, but many of these powers are used routinely to collect information about innocent Americans," they write. "And very often, it is racial and ethnic minority groups who are disproportionately targeted."
Martin told
the Daily Caller the "thinking behind these alliances is to send a message to Washington that Americans are absolutely fed up."
"When Tea Party Patriots, ACLU, and NAACP can set aside their oft-adversarial history, come together, and say to Washington, 'We have a problem' … then Washington has a problem," Martin told the website in an email.
"And they'd better pay attention."
In their opinion piece, the pair criticized
the House passage of the USA Freedom Act last week, which would prohibit the bulk collection of phone records, saying it wouldn't stop the government "from accessing those records from telephone companies" with approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, "a secret court that approves 99.96 of the government’s requests."
And, they added, "it doesn’t address government spying abuses authorized by other surveillance authorities."
"It’s not often that the NAACP and the tea party agree on much of anything, but we have come together over a common concern to fight for a common cause: We want our government to stop spying on innocent Americans," they write.
They urged the Senate to "pull the plug."
"By wiping the slate clean, our country can have the much-needed debate about how much of our liberty and privacy we are willing to give up in the name of domestic surveillance," the pair write.
The Daily Caller reports both groups are also running TV ads urging voters to "tell Congress [to] protect our privacy."
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.