House Homeland Security Committee Democrats on Wednesday lamented the panel’s decision to advance counterterrorism legislation in response to last month’s mass shooting in Charleston.
The committee’s ranking member Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said that the Obama administration has not been sufficiently open about existing efforts to combat domestic extremism, and said he wants to further explore incumbent initiatives before proceeding.
“There are overarching questions about the degree to which federal efforts to counter extremist violence are focused on domestic terrorist threats,” he commented at a hearing held in the morning before the afernoon mark-up of the bill, the Countering Violent Extremism Act.
“Unfortunately, today’s hearing will not bring us any closer to getting answers to these timely questions as, I said, none of the federal government witnesses are here to testify,” he added.
Thompson later said that The Department of Homeland Security did not send witnesses to the hearing because it argued that an inter-agency panel would be required to give a full description of the administration’s strategy.
The bill, which was passed by a voice vote, would create an “Office for Countering Violent Extremism” within the Department of Homeland Security, if it becomes law.
Although at the end of the mark-up he said he’d like to see the proposal supported on the House floor by both parties after collaboration, the committee’s chair, Michael McCaul (R-Texas) initially criticized Democrats for opposing “the legislation we’re gonna bring forward today.”
He also noted that he had scheduled the morning hearing in response to a request made by Thompson after the mass murder in Charleston–an act carried out by a white supremacist named Dylann Roof.
“The Department witness, you’re correct, is not here,” McCaul said to Thompson. “But this hearing is entitled both ‘Countering International and Domestic Terrorism’–domestic terrorism. And the bill that we’re gonna mark up later today, I would argue, almost expands the scope within the department to not be faced solely on foreign international terrorism, but domestic, in response to the shootings in South Carolina.”
The attempt to portray the measure as bipartisan did not mollify Democrats.
“I just find it rushed,” Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.) said during the hearing.
“I come from a district where the FBI put in undercover agents to go into our mosques and infiltrate our Muslim youth,” she also noted, voicing her concerns that the CVE office would profile suspects.
Those concerns had been shared by almost four dozen civil liberties groups who said the proposal would weaken “freedom of speech, association, and religion.
“Given the lack of a sound research basis for CVE programming, establishing a high-level DHS office devoted to the matter would be a further waste of security resources,” the groups said in a letter. “This is particularly the case since the Obama Administration rolled out pilot CVE programs in Boston, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis led by the Justice Department last year. These programs have already garnered intense opposition within the American Muslim communities they target.”
