Senate Republicans are gathering against a House-passed bill that would allow 'special offices' within the government to investigate and monitor domestic terrorism, which is being advocated following a racist shooting in Buffalo that left 10 people dead.
The GOP compares the proposal, which sets up offices in the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the FBI to target domestic terrorism, to the recently paused disinformation committee set up by the Biden Administration.
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“It sounds terrible,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) of the House-passed bill, predicting it won’t get 10 Republicans in the Senate.
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“It’s like the disinformation board on steroids. Another way to look at it is the Patriot Act for American citizens,” he added, citing the law passed immediately after the September 11, 2001, attacks that expanded the government’s power to monitor phone and email conversations and collect bank records.
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Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) says he will obtain the bill to the floor this week to respond to the killings at a Buffalo supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood. The bill passed the House 222-203 on a mostly party-line vote, with Rep. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) casting the only GOP vote in favor.
Democrats increasingly see the need for the state to take more action against the threat of domestic terrorism given a long string of incidents that include the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol and several mass shootings targeting Black, Hispanic and Jewish people. However, the efforts have run into resistance from the GOP.
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Senate conservatives say empowering the departments of Homeland Security and Justice with new authority to monitor domestic terrorism could easily transform into federal policing of political speech, and they worry it would be more targeted toward anti-government, anti-immigration activists than extreme Left-wing groups.
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“I’m completely opposed to this idea that we would be giving the federal government and federal law enforcement power and authority to surveil Americans, to engage in any kind of monitoring of speech that is directed toward censorship. I think it’s extremely frightening and I can’t believe they haven’t learned their lesson from the disinformation board debacle,” Hawley said.
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The Biden administration ran into a storm of debate last month when it announced the establishment of the Disinformation Governance Board “to coordinate countering misinformation related to homeland security.” The criticism became so intense that the Homeland Security Department put the project on halt after three weeks and its executive director, Nina Jankowicz, resigned.
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Republican lawmakers claim that bringing the bill to the floor after the shooting in Buffalo is a veiled political attack on Conservative critics of illegal immigration.
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