Posted on 09/19/2014 4:36:29 PM PDT by VitacoreVision
Senator Ted Cruz isn’t one to throw a bone to the Obama administration. But a new bill that he introduced would give the government enormous new powers when it comes to national security.
It’s called the “Expatriate Terrorist Act” and on the surface its intentions seem good enough. It allows the United States to revoke the citizenship of anyone fighting for or aiding a terrorist group like ISIS.
“If we do not pass this legislation, the consequence will be that Americans fighting alongside ISIS today may come home tomorrow with a U.S. passport, may come home to New York or Los Angeles or Houston or Chicago and innocent Americans may be murdered if the Senate does not act today,” Cruz said yesterday.
The Cruz bill is similar to one former senator Scott Brown introduced last year, co-sponsored with former senator Joe Lieberman. Earlier this week Brown appeared on Fox News to boast that he’d given Cruz the idea.
As many as 100 U.S. citizens are believed to have linked up with ISIS, all of whom could theoretically return home and stage an attack on the United States. So Cruz’s idea is common sense, right?
There’s just one problem: Cruz’s bill allows the feds to strip someone of citizenship without requiring due process for suspects. As Ian Millhiser points out:
Should Cruz’s bill become law, [the government] would only need to prove it by a “preponderance of the evidence” standard — which is to say there’s a lot of evidence against the suspect, but it’s not necessarily an iron-clad case. That’s a much lower burden of proof on the government than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard that applies in criminal proceedings.
Meaning Ted Cruz is actually ceding an enormous power to Barack Obama’s government: the ability to revoke someone’s citizenship without meeting the usual high standards of the criminal justice system.
Plus, as Millhiser notes, the crime of aiding and abetting ISIS is already covered in the Constitution: it’s treason, and treason has a much higher evidentiary standard than just a “preponderance of the evidence.”
Yesterday Democrats blocked Cruz’s bill in the Senate, saying that more time was needed to review its constitutional implications. As they do so, let’s hope they remember Senator Rand Paul’s words on Anwar al-Awlaki who was killed by a United States drone strike.
“In our country, even if you are a terrible person, if you are murderer or a rapist, you are accused, but then you’re given a chance to confront your accusers,” Paul said. “The burden is on the government.”
Your citizenship would only be revoked if you are associated with known terrorist.
The bill probably wouldn’t hold up in court but he got the dems on the record of not wanting to keep people known to be associating with terrorist out of the country.
I was thinking, if you are no longer a citizen you get in state tuition, free health care, special dispensation on driver licenses, and a free trip to the zoo, among many other perks.
I’m being facetious. The bill is a bad idea. I am against all new laws, period. We have laws to deal with terrorists and treason in place already; they simply need to enforce those. New laws are usually to do something underhanded.
I’d like to go on record for telling American soldiers who may be sent back over there, if you encounter any “American” fighting with the terrorists, I won’t think any less of them is they eliminate the problem on the spot.
The last thing we need is hundreds of John Walker Lindhs sitting in American prisons costing Lord knows how much money filing appeal after appeal after appeal.
Hyperbole much. Illegal aliens cause more harm to Americans than Islamic 'terrorism'. One does not need to join a terrorist organization to cause harm here. We have enough random acts of violence to cancel out the dangers of blanket bandits.
Not only that, but there is no powers of .gov to take away ones citizenship without due process. Mr. Cruz is using the classic panic button to add more powers to .Gov.
Kill them. Whether they were still citizens or not doesn’t really matter at that point does it?
You know we are operating in Bizarro Obama world where laws that we believe would protect America are not enforced. The FBI has admitted they wouldn’t keep ISIS adherents out.
WASHINGTON (CBSDC) — Rep. Michele Bachmann says she was told by the FBI that Americans who joined the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria in the Middle East would be allowed to return to the U.S.
So our Senator has to confront this danger.
Its a sad day when we have to worry that TFG is going to throw welcome home parades for jihaidis while letting honorable American vets suffer in the dysfunctional VA and the DHS indicates that we are the nation’s terrorist threat.
I'm pretty sure beheading our citizens is an act of war.
I don’t have a problem with this provided it has a strict and non arbitrary method and clear criteria for the revoking of citizenship. I think the best standard would be to only allow this to be used where an individual has been captured or wounded fighting for the enemy. We don’t want this to turn into some kind of sedition act where someone criticizing a politician or criticizing a military action is labeled a terrorist. I totally agree that if someone is fighting alongside terrorists they should lose their citizenship but we should not let this kind of thing be blurred nor should the power be placed in the hands of one lone politician or bureaucrat.
I’m inclined to oppose this kind of law.
If you are going to revoke someone’s citizenship for joining ISIS, you should at the very least have declared war on it. If you aren’t prepared to declare war, then you have no business revoking someone’s citizenship over it. Especially when they were probably armed by us in the first place. Are we going to revoke Obama’s citizenship?
Trick question, that. :)
Hey, Obama declared kinetic smothering from above while hand holding a couple of countries in the region, isn’t’ that good enough.
“it isn’t so much the multiple wives that makes them nuts, it is the multiple mother in laws that make them suicidal.”
roflmto..that is just too funny, and probably the best explanation I’ve heard.
You, sir, are absolutely correct in this — except you are constraining the propensity to mischief too much: the Republicans would do the same.
Once the elite have the ability to revoke your citizenship, and therefore exclude your vote, why should they continue their pretense of caring about you?
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