WASHINGTON – President Trump used the London terror attack to renew his push for a travel ban on certain Muslim countries, but at least two Senate Republicans are publicly questioning his priorities.
Sen. Roy Blunt, a member of GOP Senate leadership who led Trump’s inauguration ceremony, said the president should focus on implementing a more rigorous vetting of foreign visitors.
“My view is the president does have certainly the right to put in place extreme vetting,” Blunt, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told “Fox News Sunday.” “It has been four months since they said they needed four months to put that in place. I think you can do that without a travel ban and hopefully, we are.”
Trump’s executive action to temporarily bar visitors from several Muslim countries from entering the United States has been entangled in several legal challenges.
But the deadly terrorist attack in London prompted a political reaction by Trump to criticize the court system for holding up his order.
“We need to be smart, vigilant and tough,” Trump said Saturday night from his personal account in his initial Twitter response to the terrifying London Bridge attack. “We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!”
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) also disagreed with Trump’s response.
“I think that the travel ban is too broad, and that is why it has been rejected by the courts,” Collins told CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “The president is right, however, that we need to do a better job of vetting individuals who are coming from war-torn countries into our nation. But I do believe that the very broad ban that he has proposed is not the right way to go.”
The revised travel ban was to bar travelers for 90 days from six Muslim-majority countries — Syria, Iran, Libya, Sudan, Yemen and Somalia — and suspend the refugee program for 120 days. The intended goal was to use the pause to roll out enhanced vetting policies to ensure terrorists don’t get into the United States.
One Trump backer insisted the president was “right” to push for a travel ban and it’s “embarrassing” politicians like British Prime Minister Theresa May acted shocked when terrorists took advantage of their “open borders.”
“If you keep getting hurt by mosquito bites at some point you decide to start killing mosquitoes,” former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee told Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures.” “What has to happen across this world is we recognize that when we are being destroyed and devoured by the mosquitoes – by this evil – at some point you’ve just got to attack it head on.”
In response to the attacks, British Prime Minister Theresa May called for better regulations of cyberspace to cut back on the radicalization and recruitment of would-be terrorists.
Sen. Mark Warner, who made a fortune in the technology sector, agreed that high-tech companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google must take on more responsibility.
“I think we do have to reexamine the roles of all of these platform companies … and recognize there may need to be some responsibility to curate information,” Warner told CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
Warner (D-Va.) said tech companies first started to regulate content around child pornography and now have to move on to fake news and terrorism.
“Obviously there’s value in the internet, we want to continue to have these connections,” Warner said. “But there’s also, we’re seeing the dark side.”
