Unamimous Consent Requests -- S. Res. 2779

Floor Speech

Mr. CRUZ. Mr. President, I rise today to ask that Republicans and Democrats in the Senate to come together and unanimously pass legislation to address the threat of American citizens fighting for ISIS and bringing our statutory system into the 21st century to protect the national security interests of our Nation.

As the American people are now painfully aware, the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, has emerged as the new face of the radical terrorist threat that has bedeviled the West in recent decades. This virulent jihadist group--so extreme they got kicked out of Al Qaeda, which I will note is not easy to do--is rampaging across Syria and Iraq in a campaign of oppression and genocide, including the relentless targeting and murder of Christians, of Jews, of Muslim minority sects, Yazidis--indeed, any who do not share their radical Sunni theology.

While other terrorist organizations have been content with a parasitic relationship with state sponsors of terrorism--notably Syria and Iran--ISIS has a new agenda, which is to establish its own state or caliphate. They now control a territory about the size of Indiana with oilfields they can exploit on the black market to the tune of some $1.5 million a day. Their ranks have grown in the last 3 months alone from roughly 10,000 to now more than 30,000.

Unlike some regional jihadists, ISIS also represents a direct and growing threat to our citizens here at home, and increasingly to our homeland itself. Just this week there were news reports of an online posting urging individual jihadists in the United States to attack targets such as Times Square, the Las Vegas strip, and even locations in my home State of Texas, with homemade pipe bombs. This is not the first time we have heard such threats, but we have to take them seriously. ISIS has made no secret that its goal is not simply to establish a caliphate in the Middle East; its desire is to impose Sharia law on the Muslim population and to exterminate any religious minorities, and that desire is not confined by geography. When the leader of ISIS, Abu al-Baghdadi, was released from a detention camp in Iraq in 2009, he reportedly remarked to Army COL Kenneth King, ``See you in New York.'' This danger, this evil intends to come home to America.

ISIS has in recent weeks graphically demonstrated their eagerness to murder American civilians by beheading two journalists, gruesomely demonstrating on the world stage their hatred for America. This is not a situation where if we simply leave ISIS alone, they will leave us alone. This is a case where America's national security interests demand a serious response, which should be both to attack ISIS directly and take them out in its claimed caliphate, as well as to defend against the attacks ISIS is planning to execute here at home.

The Obama administration's approach to this crisis has unfortunately lacked a clear focus on that issue. It doesn't help that ISIS is surrounded by regional chaos borne out of a Syrian civil war, and ISIS has exploited the inherent political weakness in Iraq. However, while both the crisis in Syria and the upheaval in Baghdad are unfortunate, concerning situations, we cannot allow resolving them to become preconditions to any military action we might need to take against ISIS.

All too often, the Obama administration proposals threaten to become embroiled in the midst of these political crises. For example, they have made training and equipping the Free Syrian Army a cornerstone of their plan to fight ISIS. But just this week, the leader of the Free Syrian Army reportedly announced he would not participate in the fight against ISIS unless we pledged to join in his fight against Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad.

While this is certainly understandable from his perspective, resolving the Syrian civil war is not our mission nor the job of the military and we should not be making the Free Syrian Army, whose focus is Assad, central to the American plan of defending our Nation against the jihadist threat of ISIS.

The administration's ISIS policy is also marked by internal confusion that further demonstrates a lack of focus on what should be our clear mission. The President has repeatedly insisted that there will be no American boots on the ground in Iraq and Syria, as he wants any action to be led by others, even while he increases U.S. personnel in the country by a few hundred here and a few hundred there. Earlier this week, his top general, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, admitted there were circumstances under which he would change his advice to the President to recommending ground troops--a suggestion that was subsequently echoed by the Chief of Staff of the Army and even Vice President Biden. The American people need and deserve greater clarity on what exactly our military mission is, and how what the President envisions relates to the advice his Department of Defense is giving him.

The disconnect between what we know or do not know about the Americans fighting for ISIS in Iraq and Syria is equally concerning. Estimates range from about one dozen, according to one Pentagon spokesman, to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel's reassertion of about 100 Americans fighting with ISIS in this week's Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.

Either way, Secretary Hagel agreed with my characterization of the risks posed that Americans will take U.S. passports after fighting with ISIS, after training with ISIS, to come back and commit unspeakable acts of terror here at home. Secretary Hagel agreed that risk was significant. It seems only prudent to address that threat.

I am, therefore, going to be asking for unanimous consent for the Senate to pass the Expatriate Terrorist Act of 2014, which will make fighting for ISIS, taking up arms against the United States, an affirmative renunciation of American citizenship.

I should note the Expatriate Terrorist Act is very similar to the bipartisan legislation proposed by Senators Joe Lieberman and Scott Brown in 2010 to address Americans who were joining Al Qaeda overseas, notably the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, or here at home Faisal Shahzad, who attempted to blow up a car bomb in Times Square.

The Expatriate Terrorist Act thus has applicability beyond the immediate threat of ISIS. It is an important adjustment of our existing laws governing the renunciation of citizenship. To reflect the threat posed by nonnation terrorist groups, as then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said concerning the Brown-Lieberman legislation:

United States citizenship is a privilege. It is not a right. People who are serving foreign powers--

Or in this case, foreign terrorists-- are clearly in violation of that oath which they swore when they became citizens.

The Expatriate Terrorist Act of 2014 is only a very modest change to current law. It is one small step in a larger and necessary effort to refocus our ISIS strategy that I urge President Obama to consider immediately.

We also urgently need to address the question of border security on our southern border so our failure to defend ourselves does not become a weakness that ISIS and other terrorists exploit to carry out unspeakable acts of terror here at home.

The American people expect Republicans and Democrats to join together to speak in one uniform voice when it comes to protecting the national security and when it comes to protecting the lives of Americans here at home.

If we do not pass this legislation, the consequence will be that Americans fighting alongside ISIS today may come home tomorrow with a U.S. passport, may come home to New York or Los Angeles or Houston or Chicago. Innocent Americans may be murdered if the Senate does not act today.

Therefore, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 554, S. 2779. I further ask consent that the bill be read a third time and passed and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

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