The ACLU objected, you see: the civil liberties of those U.S. citizens who have declared war against the United States must be preserved. And when the dead bodies are being counted, I hope the ACLU and Senator Mazie Hirono will stand up and take a bow. “Senator BLOCKS Ted Cruz bill to seize passports from ISIS fighters who return to the US,” by David Martosko, Daily Mail, September 18, 2014 (thanks to Jerk Chicken):
A showdown over the passports of so called ‘foreign fighters’ – Americans and other westerners who have joined the ISIS terror army in Iraq and Syria – came to a head on Thursday when a U.S. senator killed legislation aiming to strip them of their citizenship.
Democrat Mazie Hirono, a freshman senator from Hawaii, objected on the Senate floor when Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas tried to fast-track his ‘Expatriate Terrorists Act.’
Cruz bypassed the Senate’s committee process in order to rush the legislation to a vote, meaning that any single senator could block it.
Since the Senate is sprinting through its final days in session this year, he said, putting the bill through committee ‘would mean that it could not pass in time to prevent Americans fighting right now with ISIS from coming back and murdering other Americans.’
Hawaii Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono blocked the legislation, saying she and other Democrats wanted more time — and likely pushing the issue off until after the November elections
‘There is an urgency and an exigency to this situation,’ Cruz said on the Senate floor.
Hirono said she chose to throw up a road block because ‘legislation that grants the government the ability to strip citizenship from Americans is a serious matter raising significant constitutional issues.’
She also cited letters of objection from the Constitution Project and the American Civil Liberties Union.
The question of what to do about ISIS-aligned foreign fighters who have U.S. passports has occupied the attention of the FBI, the Homeland Security Department and the State Department, which issues passports and can revoke them if a judge agrees there’s a compelling reason.
In testimony Thursday before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Secretary of State John Kerry argued that the U.S. needs ‘to stop the foreign fighters who carry passports from countries around the world including the United States.’
‘What I want to make certain, Kerry told the congressional panel, ‘is that anybody who has a passport [and joins with ISIS] ‘who returns, returns in handcuffs – not through customs with their passport.’…