Secure Freedom Minute

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

The warning “You want it bad, you get it bad” surely applies to the process of legislating. A prime example is the present effort to jam a bill known as the “First Step Act” through the U.S. Senate during the lame-duck session.

This initiative has deeply divided Senate Republicans, but enjoys the strong support of communist Van Jones and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner. They have encouraged Donald Trump to believe he can set free large number of convicted felons – including inherently violent ones, like fentanyl dealers – without destroying his own, and his party’s, differentiating “tough-on-crime” appeal to voters.

Sponsors of the First Step Act are still rewriting parts of it, even as they insist that this bill must take precedence over other, more pressing legislation.  That’s a formula for getting it bad – at the expense of public safety and the national security.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

The first test of the kind of House Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy will be is at hand.  He’ll be leading a selection process this week for the top GOP members of key committees in the next Congress. 

If Rep. McCarthy will be a principled champion of the sorts of causes that led the Republicans to victory in the House in 2016 – namely, the perception that they would support Candidate Trump’s agenda on building the Wall, repealing Obamacare, defeating radical Islamic terrorism, etc. – he will ensure that robust conservative lawmakers like Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows are tapped.  They will work tirelessly to prevent Democratic abuses of power on the Judiciary and Oversight Committees, respectively.

If Mr. McCarthy instead opts for cronies and yes-men, he will be seriously disserving his President, party and country – perhaps with politically fatal effect in 2020.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

We recently learned that North Korea is preparing its people for the effects of electromagnetic pulse, or EMP.  Whether that’s because Kim Jong-un’s despotic regime intends to initiate the use of such weapons with a nuclear arsenal he has no intention of dismantling is a matter of debate.

What should no longer be is the reality that our vastly more vulnerable people and society must be protected against the potentially catastrophic effects of attacks involving electromagnetic pulse – or, for that matter, cyberwarfare, sabotage or powerful solar storms – on the U.S. electric grid.

I had the opportunity yesterday to participate in an extraordinarily exciting meeting in which the political, business and military leaders of one of America’s largest cities came together to begin making their community resilient against such mortal dangers.

Wouldn’t you want the same for yours?

This is Frank Gaffney. Learn more at SecuretheGrid.com.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

For some time now, 2018 has been called “The Year of the Woman.” That’s mostly because lots of women have been running for office and, more recently, because many won.  

Last week, a District judge in Detroit named Bernard Friedman created a new basis for associating this year with women: Tens of thousands of them may now be brutally and permanently disfigured because he ruled that a federal statute banning female genital mutilation (or FGM) is unconstitutional.

Fortunately, the twenty-three women in the U.S. Senate have an immediate opportunity to discourage such carnage. The House has already unanimously passed the “SAFE Act,” tripling the sentence for perpetrating FGM. This bill can and must be amended in the Senate during the present, lame-duck session, making 2018 the year vulnerable females were protected again in America.

This is Frank Gaffney. Find out how you can help at EndFGMToday.com.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

A federal judge in Detroit has just intensified the danger faced by over half a million women and girls living in the United States. That’s the shocking number the Centers for Disease Control officially estimate are at risk of a lifetime of horrific physical and psychological abuse caused by female genital mutilation, or FGM.

Whatever the technical merits of Judge Bernard Friedman’s ruling, it will be seen as a green light for mutilators in our country to butcher little girls and other females, especially in the 23 states lacking their own FGM ban.

The good news is that this setback for women’s rights can – and must – be corrected immediately in the present lame-duck session of Congress. Meanwhile, every state must ensure that their women and girls are protected from this particularly barbaric form of abuse.

This is Frank Gaffney. Find out how you can help at EndFGMToday.com.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

The presence of threatening mobs on our southern border vindicates Donald Trump’s 2018 campaign warnings and his signature 2016 campaign pledge:  We need “the Wall.”  Ask the people of Tijuana who wish they had one to keep out the criminal elements and predominantly military age young men now occupying their city.

For a few more days, the President’s party is in control of both houses of Congress.  This lame-duck session may be the last opportunity to secure the funding he has sought to finish the Wall in those stretches of the border where it is required. Without the Wall and with magnets like judicially imposed amnesty, we will have lots more illegal aliens.

If the House Republican leadership doesn’t want to be permanently in the minority, it must abandon its support for open borders and use the lame-duck session to fund the Wall.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is being pressed to schedule a quick Senate vote on the so-called “First Step Act” without a committee hearing.  Opponents call it the “Jailbreak Bill” because it would free early many federal felons convicted of supposedly “non-violent” crimes.

The bill’s supporters want to use the short window of the lame-duck session – when large numbers of legislators who aren’t returning next year can cast votes for which they can’t be held accountable – because, if Americans actually knew the kinds of criminals who would be treated as “non-violent,” they would furiously oppose such a jailbreak.

For example, traffickers of fentanyl and heroin and convicts who physically assaulted spouses, children or police officers would be eligible for greatly reduced sentences and early release.

Public safety requires an informed and deliberative process on the First Step Act, not what’s afoot at the moment. 

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

The Trump administration is reportedly considering afresh a longstanding request by Turkey’s Sharia-supremacist president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to deport another Turkish Islamist who previously helped Erdogan’s “fundamental transformation” of their nation. 

It’s tempting to endorse the idea of expelling Fethullah Gulen.  After all, he has built an empire of charter schools across the United States that are using generous taxpayer subsidies stealthily to inculcate Turkish- supremacism in many thousands of Americans as a kind of gateway drug for Sharia-supremacism.

Still, no good can come of appeasing Erdogan, who stopped behaving like a reliable U.S. ally years ago.  It would only embolden him to act even more aggressively, in his region and here.  Our interests would be far better served by relentlessly investigating Gulen’s Trojan Horse schools and other problematic business ventures in this country and, if warranted, strip him of them. 

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Yesterday, President Trump signaled that he would sign a so-called “First Step” criminal justice reform bill that would reduce penalties for certain crimes and shorten sentences for some felons who have perpetrated them.

The question that occurs is: First step towards what?

The more honest of this legislation’s proponents state the obvious: They intend soon to pursue further changes in the criminal code that will put still more hardened criminals back on our streets. Others, though, insist that the first step will be the last one.  

Given the stakes for public safety, any such legislative overhaul should be subjected to close scrutiny and rigorous debate. But, the First Step bill is instead being hastily blown through Congress during the lame-duck session.  If that happens, it will likely be the first step towards a much less safe America and real peril for her people.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

On Sunday, the New York Times Magazine’s lead article accused the Trump administration of ignoring the danger posed by murderous neo-Nazis in the United States. Even more outlandish than this accusation of gross malfeasance was the alleged reason:  According to the Times, my organization, the Center for Security Policy, has the feds instead chasing after “anti-Muslim conspiracy theories.”

This is ludicrously absurd. In fact, our government persists in funding “countering violent extremism” projects that actually play down jihadist threats.

Incredibly, last weekend’s Washington Post Magazine also discussed the Center for Security Policy’s work. The Post, however, took a critical look at the role played by the Southern Poverty Law Center in smearing us and others with falsehoods like those promoted by the New York Times.

The truth is America has – and must be defended against – all enemies, foreign and domestic.  

This is Frank Gaffney.