The House Foreign Affairs Committee formally killed a GOP proposal to give Secretary of State Marco Rubio the power to revoke Americans’ passports over alleged terror ties on Thursday — but not before Democrats lambasted the idea one last time.
Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla., floated giving Rubio unilateral power over passports when he introduced a larger State Department reorganization bill last week. Following an online backlash, he introduced an amendment to his own bill dropping the idea on Sunday.
On Thursday, committee members formally approved the amendment from Mast, putting an end to the proposal for now.
The proposal would have allowed the secretary of state to refuse to issue passports or revoke them from people he determined to have provided material support to terrorists. That rang alarm bills for civil liberties groups, especially in the context of Rubio’s ongoing push to strip visas from noncitizens critical of Israel.
With advocates mindful that the measure could be reintroduced in the future, however, Democrats on the panel highlighted the provision in committee hearings Wednesday as they attacked the larger reorganization bill.
New York Rep. Gregory Meeks, the ranking Democrat on the committee, said Wednesday that the proposal was “attempting to subvert our Constitution’s right to free speech.”
Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, said the provision would be vulnerable to abuse from the State Department. He warned that it might deny Americans the ability to visit family abroad.
“Travel abroad is a form of expression and association. For many Americans, passports are not luxuries, they are necessary,” he said.
Mast on Monday defended the idea as uncontroversial and said he only dropped it to avoid it becoming a “distraction.”
Civil rights groups including the Council on American-Islamic Relations said they would remain on guard for future attempts to revive the idea.
“Section 226 was a direct attack on Americans’ constitutional rights, threatening to strip citizens of their freedom to travel and to speak freely about human rights issues abroad,” Robert McCaw, CAIR’s government affairs director, said in a statement. “We remain vigilant, and we will continue to fight any legislation that undermines Americans’ freedoms.”