U.S. Rep. David Jolly, R-Fla., who is running to replace U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., in the U.S. Senate in 2016, called on businessman Donald Trump to get out of the Republican presidential race after he called for a temporary ban on Muslims coming to the U.S.
"While ISIS is beheading innocent people for their religious practices, Trump is betraying our freedoms," Jolly said in a statement released early Tuesday morning. "His brutal, bullying bigotry runs contrary to the very principles our forefathers fought so hard to defend. We are either a party of protecting the constitution and religious liberties or we're not. America should insist on a security test but never a religious test."
Jolly was responding to the Trump campaign’s call “for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on.”
Trump and his team pointed to surveys from Pew Research and other groups which found “there is great hatred towards Americans by large segments of the Muslim population." The Trump campaign also noted a Center for Security poll which found "25 percent of those polled agreed that violence against Americans here in the United States is justified as a part of the global jihad" and “51 percent of those polled, ‘agreed that Muslims in America should have the choice of being governed according to Shariah.'"
“Without looking at the various polling data, it is obvious to anybody the hatred is beyond comprehension,” Trump said on Monday. “Where this hatred comes from and why we will have to determine. Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life. If I win the election for president, we are going to ‘Make America Great Again.'"
In responding to Trump, Jolly showcased his support of Congress passing an Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) against Islamic State terrorism and called on other candidates to join his call for Trump to get out of the race.
"Our national security is the only lens through which we should make decisions regarding the destruction of terror,” Jolly said. “But we can do so without fundamentally abandoning our most basic tenets of religious freedom. I am a born-again Christian who opposes any religious litmus test that defies everything we believe in."
Jolly was not alone among Florida Republicans in hitting Trump’s comments. Along with most of the other Republican presidential hopefuls, former Gov. Jeb Bush, R-Fla., and U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., criticized Trump’s remarks. On the other side of the aisle, U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) also called Trump out.
“Outrageous proposals like Donald Trump’s total ban on Muslim immigration only play into the hands of terrorists like ISIL/Daesh who use the worldview of a ‘clash of civilizations’ as the driver for recruitment to their perverted and murderous ideology,” Wasserman Schultz insisted on Monday.
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