Should Marco Rubio Get To Seize Your Passport For Donating To Democrats, Other Terrorist Organizations?
Boy, we're all so hysterical, right?
It has been apparent for well over a decade now that the Right and the Left have very different ideas about what constitutes freedom of speech.
Here on the Left, we oppose the government regulating what people can and cannot say, and we support individuals voting with their feet and voting with their dollars, publicly expressing their views, and the ability of private, non-governmental spaces to decide what sort of decorum they want to allow.
On the Right, they think that all of that is anti-free speech (unless it’s something very important, like Cracker Barrel changing its logo), but do support the government’s right to police speech they don’t like. Like Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who had Turkish Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk arrested and stripped of her visa in March for writing an op-ed calling for her school to divest from Israel for starving and killing God knows how many Palestinians. After all, for the conservatives, it is only acceptable to criticize Israel if you are a famously anti-semitic person like Nick Fuentes or Candace Owens or Marjorie Taylor Greene or Tucker Carlson — not if you’re a person who just thinks that it’s bad to genocide people regardless of one’s religious beliefs or ethnicity. (To be fair, some in both major political parties have been very committed to pretending the latter category does not actually exist.)
Now, Rubio would like to do some more extreme free speech, right-wing-style, and the Republican Party is excited to help him. On Wednesday, the House will hold a hearing on a bill introduced by Rep. Brian Mast (R-Florida) that would allow Rubio to seize US citizens’ passports if Rubio personally determines that they are providing “material support” to a terrorist organization.
Extremely necessary reminder: Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and Vice President JD Vance are both currently calling everyone from George Soros to the Ford Foundation “terrorist organizations.”
RIGHT NOW!
According to The Intercept:
One section grants the secretary of state the power to revoke or refuse to issue passports for people who have been convicted of — or merely charged with — material support for terrorism. […]
The other section sidesteps the legal process entirely. Rather, the secretary of state would be able to deny passports to people whom they determine “has knowingly aided, assisted, abetted, or otherwise provided material support to an organization the Secretary has designated as a foreign terrorist organization.”
This means that US citizens could be stripped of their right to travel, without any due process, entirely at the whim of Marco Rubio or whoever the next secretary of State might be.
It is already very illegal to provide material support to terrorists and it will cause one, if convicted, to lose one’s passport. This bill, however, would not require that people actually be convicted of anything and could include things like donating money to NGOs Rubio does not like or publicly opposing a war he does.
It could even include simply insulting the sacred memory of Charlie Kirk.
After all, Rubio announced this week on Twitter that he will be revoking the visas of legal immigrants he determines to be “celebrating” the death of Charlie Kirk or just quoting him. That is how Karen Attiah lost her job as the last full time Black columnist for the Washington Post (which is apparently quite determined to demonstrate exactly how democracy can die in darkness).
It could perhaps include donating money to or voting for the Democratic Party, which Stephen Miller has recently declared a “domestic extremist organization” and a “terrorist network.”
It could also include simply being trans, given the way Republicans have been working to paint transgender people as being somehow especially prone to violence. On Tuesday, Marjorie Taylor Green’s boyfriend, Brian Glenn, a correspondent for Real America’s Voice, asked Trump if he would declare what he calls “transtifa” (I assume this means all trans people?) to be a domestic terror organization and ban Pride flags for “representing the transtifa,” and Trump was open to the entirely batshit suggestion.
It could include literally anything anyone in the Trump administration doesn’t like, because the bill does not actually offer up an actual definition of the kind of “material support” that would not cause one to face any kind of actual charges, but could result in them losing their passport.
On the bright side, those who lost their passports under this law would be able to appeal the decision to Marco Rubio, whose decision it was to take it away from them in the first place. That should be very helpful.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Let's be frank. Right wingers don't support Jewish people. In fact they hate them. But they love Israel because that is where the gateway to the rapture is.
Who is going to tell Little Marco that foreigners don’t want to come here anymore? Tourism is down and it’s going to get worse. Canadiens are selling their second homes in Florida and others are cancelling their reservations to Las Vegas. It appears that once again a Republican administration is going to tank our economy.