Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., will schedule a vote next week on legislation aimed at curbing domestic terrorism following last week's mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, that left 10 people dead, reports The Hill.
"I announced to our caucus at lunch that we are going to file cloture on the domestic terrorism bill next week. And we hope our Republican colleagues will understand how important this is given what's going on in the country with replacement theory, with so much bigoted, bigoted voices on all of our news media, and we hope they'll join us," Schumer said Wednesday.
"But we will have a vote next week on cloture on this bill," he added.
The bill, H.R. 350, would create dedicated domestic terrorism offices in the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice and the FBI.
"The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act is what Congress can do this week to try to prevent future Buffalo shootings — to prevent future California shootings, future El Paso shootings, future Charleston shootings, future Pittsburgh shootings, future Wisconsin shootings," said Rep. Brad Schneider, who introduced the measure in 2017. "We need to ensure that federal law enforcement has the resources they need to best preemptively identify and thwart extremist violence wherever the threat appears."
The suspect in the Buffalo shooting, an 18-year-old white man, allegedly wrote a 180-page screed that laid out plans to attack Black people.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., on Wednesday invited Republican colleagues to support the legislation.
"It's time to get this bill to the president's desk and signed into law," he said. "We have widespread support from the civil rights community. We've worked with our colleagues in the House to work out objections related to ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] issues.
"Today I'll be reintroducing an updated version of the bill to match the text the House will consider this evening."
Solange Reyner ✉
Solange Reyner is a writer and editor for Newsmax. She has more than 15 years in the journalism industry reporting and covering news, sports and politics.
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