Republican presidential candidate former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee said that he would revoke passports from those who travel to fight for ISIS, but expressed reservations about the constitutionality closing mosques, and that if such a step is taken “we better make sure that we adjudicate it properly” on Wednesday’s “Varney & Co” on the Fox Business Network.
After a discussion of the Middle East, where Huckabee sharply criticized current foreign policy while advocating for a military buildup, he was asked, “would you follow Britain’s lead, where they are prepared to close mosques and prepared to say, if you go fight for ISIS overseas, you ain’t coming back?”
Huckabee answered, “I think if a person goes to fight for ISIS, they now have become an enemy combatant. I agree with that. I think the troubling thing is when you start talking about closing a mosque, we have a little problem here in America that they don’t have in Britain, it’s called the Constitution, and we have to be careful that we’re going to take a step that strong, that extreme, we better make sure that we adjudicate it properly, because you can’t just go in with the force of the executive branch and say, ‘We just don’t like what you’re saying in your mosque.’ You better have hard evidence, and then, you better take it through the judicial process, you just can’t make that arbitrary, unilateral decision to close down a place of worship, even if you find that what’s going on in that place of worship is absolutely repulsive to you.”
He was also asked, “Do you oppose raising the retirement age under Social Security?”
Huckabee responded, “I most certainly do, yeah, and here’s why, Stuart, because when people got into the Social Security program, they went in, there were certain rules, just like if you made deposits in your savings account. If the bank comes back and says, ‘You know, we’ve decided that your account is doing well, but we need that money for some of our other depositors, so we’ve taken your money, and you’re just going to have to put in more to get it back.’ Well, now you’ve stolen from those folks, and you’ve lied to them. The government has stolen from people throughout their working lives, and I say stolen, that’s a strong word, but nobody was asked ‘Would you like to pay into this fund?’ It was mandatorily taken out of our checks.”
He added that raising the retirement age and cutting Social Security benefits are “political suicide,” and “this has got to be looked at not as welfare, not as entitlement, not as a government freebie, this is money that belongs to the people who worked for a living.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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