Blog: On Friday, the President noted that "We have contained ISIS"...he made this proclamation just hours before the terrorist attacks took place in Paris

Statement

On Friday, the President noted that "We have contained ISIS"...he made this proclamation just hours before the terrorist attacks took place in Paris.

Last year, he likened ISIS to a JV team….

And now he says we need to accept Syrian refugees. He says that they will be vetted, never mind the fact that one of the terrorist in the Paris attacks came to the country posing as a refugee.

I spent a lot of time talking to people this weekend. I was down in Bluffton on Friday night, then back up to Charleston, then to Columbia, then back to Beaufort on Saturday night, then back to Charleston again, then to Beaufort and Sun City this morning before I returned to Washington this afternoon…and outside of people's bewilderment on all that had transpired in Paris, overwhelmingly, the topic I heard most about was Syrian refugees.

I'm still looking at a number of different bills in this vein, but I've had time to research the Resettlement Accountability National Security Act of 2015 (H.R. 3314) offered by Rep. Brian Babin, and I've signed on as co-sponsor.

It simply puts a pause on refugee resettlement until Congress can study the issue more closely. That seems reasonable. Let's not invite 10,000 people to America until we know who's coming...and have a way of making certain we are right.

I think this is a meaningful step in finding a balance between showing compassion towards those people seeking asylum and ensuring the safety of Americans in the United States. Doing so is important because when someone says they are going to hit you…and they have recently blown up a Russian airliner and staged bombings in Paris and Beirut...it strikes me we should take them seriously. ISIS has now said it's coming to America.

I'm also concerned in all this from an economic standpoint, because refugees automatically receive the same access to entitlement programs as U.S. citizens, while our national debt creeps a little higher every day. We lead the world in financial support to Syria and have given a total of $4 billion in humanitarian aid since 2011. This makes it that much more important to look at additional costs carefully, since financial security is a close cousin to physical security in protecting this nation.

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