“The New Peter King”: New House Homeland Security Chair May Not Be A Whole Lot Better.
Good news for people who are uneasy with New York Republican Rep. Peter King’s leadership of the House Homeland Security Committee: He’s stepping down thanks to term limits. But there’s some potential bad news: His replacement may not be a whole lot better.
Texas Republican Rep. Mike McCaul edged out Michigan Rep. Candice Miller — who was the GOP’s best hope of getting a female major committee head — and Mike Rodgers in a close private vote this week. King’s tenure as chairman drew controversy for the series of hearings he held on the radicalization of Muslims in America. Critics didn’t discount the threat of homegrown terror but said King should have expanded the hearings to include all kinds of violent radicalism, including right-wing extremism.
But McCaul has been a big booster of those hearings. “I want to thank you for demonstrating the political courage to hold these hearings,” he said to King during one last year. “I must say, I am mystified by the controversy that has followed from this. It was said by one of the members that we are investigating Muslims. Nothing could be farther from the truth. We are investigating the radicalization of Muslim youth in the United States.”
McCaul is a former federal prosecutor who headed the counterterrorism division of the U.S. attorney’s office in Texas, so his resume lends him credibility on the subject. His rhetoric is generally more mild than King’s, but some advocates in the Muslim-American community are concerned.
“In the past two years, there have been 27 terror plots, and each of them involved extreme radicalization of the Muslim faith,” he said at radicalization hearing this year. What counts as a “terror plot” is obviously subject to semantic debate, but right-wing extremists account for a good portion, if not most, of domestic terrorism under most definitions of the term.
In another hearing, he defended himself when a witness criticized him for connecting Islam and terror. “I would argue that we have to look at the obvious – that there is a religious component to this,” he said. Though he’s always careful to add that terror “doesn’t reflect the vast majority of Muslims.”
McCaul’s district is just south of Fort Hood, and he joined other Republicans in their insistence in labeling as a terrorist Maj. Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 people on the base in 2009. Hasan had corresponded with Anwar Al-Awlaki and shouted “Allahu Akbar” before opening fire, which is enough to convince McCaul that it was a “planned terror attack.” He also introduced a bill to designate victims of the attack as combatants in a combat zone.
McCaul appeared once on the radio show hosted by Frank Gaffney, the controversial activist behind Rep. Michele Bachmann’s Muslim witch hunts. Gaffney said of the congressman: “He is, in a number of capacities, a go-to guy for the sorts of things we’re interested in here at Secure Freedom Radio.” On the show, McCaul discussed one of his hobby horses, the apparent threat of Hezbollah teaming up with Mexican drug cartels to infiltrate the U.S. via the southern border. McCaul has authored two reports on the subject, both titled, “A Line in the Sand: Countering Crime, Violence, and Terror at the Southwest Border.”
He has also sent a number of “dear colleague” letters to other members of Congress asking them to support his bills to crack down on foreign terror networks. One sent in September called attention to a news article alleging the Iran’s elite Quds Force was operating in Syria and asked colleagues to support a bill to designate the unit as a terrorist organization. Others would cut off aid to Egypt and Pakistan.
None of this is particularly unusual for a conservative Republican today, but it doesn’t bode well for those who hoped that King’s departure would turn a new leaf at the Homeland Security Committee.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, December 1, 2012
Tea Party Extremism Run Amok
The success of the Tea Party movement and legitimate concern over the size of the deficit raise a serious question: What does it mean to promote small government?
The pious commitment to keeping big government out of people’s lives—or championing local control—was a common theme among Republican candidates last election season, particularly among those who professed sympathies for the Tea Party element. But local control and small government sound remarkably like pure lawlessness, as Dana Milbank brilliantly reports in Wednesday’s Washington Post.
Milbank—often amusing, always readable—with this most recent and very well-reported column, an absolute must-read, chronicles some of the anti-federal-authority efforts by state legislators:
When Louis Brandeis called state legislatures “laboratories of democracy,” he couldn’t have imagined the curious formulas the Tea Party chemists would be mixing in 2011, including: a bill just passed by the Utah legislature requiring the state to recognize gold and silver as legal tender; a Montana bill declaring global warming “beneficial to the welfare and business climate of Montana”; a plan in Georgia to abolish driver’s licenses because licensing violates the “inalienable right” to drive; legislation in South Dakota that would require every adult to buy a gun; and the Kentucky legislature’s effort to create a “sanctuary state” for coal, safe from environmental laws.
U.S. News’s own Robert Schlesinger also recently questioned the mental stability of some of these local lawmakers.
Setting aside the pure absurdity of some of those ideas, the philosophical underpinnings are pretty disturbing. Where did these local officials get the idea that any community standard—be it a proven ability to make a left turn (if not parallel park) or to avoid poisoning the environment for generations who might come after us—is some egregious infringement on their own rights?
If the anti-big-government, local-control camp wants to prove its sincerity, it can help out right here in the District of Columbia. Still the last place in the country where citizens are denied the right to full representation in Congress, the nation’s capital is again experiencing attempts by members of Congress to make decisions about school vouchers and other matters. The same lawmakers who say they want the federal government to have less control over people’s lives are using Washington as Congress’s personal lab rat. If they really believe in local control, the lawmakers will let the city of Washington alone.
By: Susan Milligan, U.S. News and World Report, March 16, 2011
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