Oregonians know Ron as a senator who listens and innovates. For example, Ron has secured landmark health care and economic wins for our workers and retirees. Always citing the need to "throw open the doors of government for Oregonians," he holds an open-to-all town hall meeting in each of Oregon's 36 counties each year. Thus far he has held more than 970 meetings, as well as several virtual town hall meetings sponsored by the nonpartisan Town Hall Project. Wyden's dedication to hearing all sides of an issue and looking for common sense, nonpartisan solutions has won him trust on both sides of the aisle and put him at the heart of so many of the Senate's most important debates. In 2011, the Almanac of American Politics described Wyden as having "displayed a genius for coming up with sensible-sounding ideas no one else had thought of and making the counter-intuitive political alliances that prove helpful in passing bills." The Washington Post's Ezra Klein wrote: "The country has problems. And Ron Wyden has comprehensive, bipartisan proposals for fixing them."
Sen. Wyden has led the fight to address the Intelligence Community’s reliance on secret interpretations of surveillance law, arguing that while “intelligence agencies need to be able to conduct operations in secret, even secret operations need to be conducted within the bounds of established, publicly understood law.”
In 2011, Wyden warned that “when the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry.” Revelations in 2013 revealed the National Security Agency (NSA) had been secretly interpreting the Patriot Act to collect millions of Americans’ phone and email data – without a warrant. Ron led the fight to end this warrantless mass surveillance that hurts both Americans’ civil liberties and the American economy.
Wyden has spent years pressing the Intelligence Community to disclose more information about how it interprets surveillance law, while increasingly raising concerns – in both classified and unclassified settings – that there is a significant gap between what the American people and most members of Congress believe is legal under laws like the Patriot Act and how government agencies are interpreting the law.