The law passed weeks after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In his recollections of the attacks a decade later, Hastert told RealClearPolitics, "then we did the Patriot Act because we had to be able to do that. There were 20-something cells in the United States. We've got to find out who they were and where they were. It wasn't popular, and there was a lot of fight in the Congress. … But those were the types of fights that we had and the things that we had to do, but we had to get them done."