Congress Pulling a Fast One with Islamist Attack Coming: You can feel it in your bones

You get so you can feel it in your bones.

When you’ve served as chief of staff to one of Capitol Hill’s much-maligned Constitutional conservatives, you learn to sense when Congress is pulling a fast one on the American people.

So take it from me: Congress is pulling a fast one on the American people.

Last week the House passed a bill allegedly responding to the Paris attacks by restricting Syrian refugees.  As a credentialed member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, I personally guarantee that this bill will not become law.  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell may say he’s for it, but it will fail on a procedural vote and he’ll shrug and move on.  Or Senate Democrats will say they’re for it and it will go to the President’s desk and he’ll veto it, but then mysteriously just enough Democratic supporters in the House or Senate will change their votes to sustain the veto.

And, frankly, Democrats are right to stop the bill, since it won’t actually do much to protect us from a Paris-style attack.  It merely requires multiple Administration figures to say each Syrian refugee is OK, which President Obama would direct those figures to do, and ultimately they would do.  One wise wag from an outside conservative group calls this particular fast one the “shiny object.”  Look at this political bill, Americans – and pay no attention to the actual policy outcome over there.

That’s the key.  If Congress is serious about securing America against the Global Jihad Movement, it has a lot more work to do.

For example, resettlement contractors paid by the head to place refugees in our midst point out that there are many far easier ways to enter the country than as a refugee.  They may have a conflict of interest they serially forget to acknowledge, but on this at least they’re right.

In fact, Islamic terrorists have exploited virtually every immigration program the country runs, including:

1. Asylum, which was used by a total of 17 terrorists between the early 1990s and 2004, including 1993 World Trade Center mastermind Omar Abdel-Rahman (better known as the Blind Sheik)
2. Temporary visas, including both the student visas used by 18 terrorists in that period, among them 9/11 hijackers, as well as the temporary visas used by an additional 17 terrorists
3. Legal Permanent Resident status, which 16 terrorists exploited in the period
4. Naturalization, used by 21 terrorists in this period; and
5. Border controls, which terrorists have circumvented not only to our South, but to our North.

In all, President Obama has agreed to allow in 10,000 Syrians in the coming fiscal year – but the total number of inadequately screened potential Islamists entering the country legally in FY2013 reached 280,276.

Thus instead of what the House has done, Congress should, in the final funding bill of this presidency that must be enacted by December 11, 2015 in order to underwrite the President’s remaining agenda:

1. Deny any funding for the president to bring in not just refugees, but also anyone coming in under any immigration program from Syria without adequate screening, excepting only members of a persecuted religious minority in order to allow in Christians who are being mass murdered. (The president says using a religious test is “shameful” and un-American, yet as former 1993 World Trade Center bombing prosecutor Andrew McCarthy points out, taking religion into account in determining refugee status is actually required by law.)
2. Likewise, deny any funding for the president to bring in those from any immigration program from other failed states whose lack of governance makes it impossible to vet them, including Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan, and Yemen, again unless they are members of a persecuted religious minority.
3. Provide the funds necessary for both the southern and northern border states’ governors to deploy their national guard to the border, as then-President George W. Bush did after 9/11, when he put 6,000 national guardsmen on the border to at long last seal it for security reasons.
4. Defund the Obama administration’s breathtaking decisionto allow in immigrants with “limited” terror contact, breaking the law in the process
5. Defund approving the chain migrationthe Left dubs “family reunification” that could be used to expand President Obama’s 10,000 Syrians exponentially
6. Defund providing the politically correct,politically driven, problem-prone and wildly unsafe “diversity visas” dreamed up by the late Senator Edward Kennedy
7. Designate funds to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to relocate more of its charges closer to home, which it systematically refuses to do causing it to run a deficit unnecessarily, since it costs 12 times more to resettle a refugee here than there; and of course,
8. Defund President Obama’s illegal and unconstitutional amnestywhich not only leaves in the country millions of illegal aliens, but does so with virtually no screening other than whether they have already committed a crime.

And we need to do it soon.  With Islamic State threatening an attack in America – and specifically in Washington, D.C., where I live with my wife and two-year old son – every additional unexplained or underexplained bridge and street closure, every BOLO (be on the lookout) alert on Salafi-type-beard-sporting suspects from authorities compounds the sense that something is coming.

When you’ve been trapped in downtown Washington during 9/11 and then driven home under the miles-long plume of smoke from the Pentagon, smelling the sickly sweet scent not just of the building but of the victims, when you’ve been in the city through plot after plot, warning after warning, rumor after rumor, you learn to sense when something is wrong.

You get so you can feel it in your bones.