Amid all the insane things we’ve done in the Middle East for decades, the killing of Soleimani was a very prudent and justified operation. Naturally, that is the event that triggered outrage from Congress and awakened legislators from their slumber on foreign policy.

After years of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars lost in aimless, unaccountable nation-building activities overseas, Democrats and some Republicans are finally asserting congressional control … only over the one “war” the Trump administration deftly avoided. But the social work operations getting our soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan will continue without any congressional oversight. It’s self-evident that the upcoming votes in the House and Senate restricting President Trump’s powers to counter Iran are all about appeasing the one country in the Middle East that actually affects us in the one theater where Trump actually beat the regime with zero American lives lost. It has nothing to do with asserting congressional control over unaccountable wars.

In two weeks, the House will vote on a bill (H.R. 5543) sponsored by Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., to block funding for any potential operations against Iran. Support is building in the Senate for a similar plan using the 1973 War Powers Act to bar any use of the military to counter Iran. The lead sponsor, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., claims he has 51 supporters for a binding resolution (SJ Res 68) because GOP Sens. Mike Lee, Rand Paul, Susan Collins, and Todd Young have agreed to it.

Over the years, in this space, I have railed against these unaccountable and missionless operations refereeing tribal warfare in the Middle East. As the body count mounted every week during Obama’s presidency and then in recent years, I have asked hard questions about why our soldiers are dying. Just two days before the strike on Soleimani, I referred to the Iraq war as a “colossal mistake.” Aside from Sens. Lee and Paul, few of these loudmouths in Congress feigning outrage over the Soleimani strike expressed concern over these wars during that era, and in fact, Democrats consistently voted for defense bills continuing these operations without question.

The president himself has consistently been skeptical of these wars for years and has expressed a desire to leave them in the rearview mirror. But he has gotten no backing from Congress. Quite the contrary. When he decided to leave Syria, which in itself (unlike Iraq) was an unauthorized war, Democrats in Congress held hearings and attacked the president mercilessly. In fact, every single Democrat in the House voted for a resolution condemning the pullout on October 16. Some even said it would boost Iran, which was a bizarre contention given that we were fighting Iran’s and Assad’s Sunni enemies there.

For every person who fits the profile of the El Paso shooter, there are likely thousands who fit the profile of Maurice Hill, the man arrested for shooting six cops in north Philadelphia yesterday. Based on a quick look at court documents from Philadelphia and Delaware Counties, Hill has a rap sheet dating back to 2001 that includes charges for illegal gun possession, drugs, driving offenses, assault, burglary, theft, robbery, kidnapping, and attempted murder. However, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, he was only “convicted six times on charges that involved illegal possession of guns, drug dealing, and aggravated assault."

Will there be any soul-searching trying to figure out why so many of these people wind up unconvinced, under-sentenced, and back on the streets? As the Inquirer put it, “his record would indicate, he does not like to go to prison. In 2008, he was convicted of escaping, fleeing from police, and resisting arrest. Along the way, he beat criminal charges on everything from kidnapping to attempted murder.”

Nope. Instead, they very people who have created the drive in the criminal justice system to let these people out of jail are pushing a war on guns for law-abiding people. Meanwhile, the criminals who illegally get guns every day in places like Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Chicago are never punished!

Most Americans understand that bad criminals do the most harm to public safety, not any single weapon or object. Yet the very people pushing a war on guns are the ones who support letting out dangerous criminal from prison. That begins with Lindsey Graham, who, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is now teaming up with Richard Blumenthal to push a “red flag” bill stripping guns from people without due process, without addressing the issue of locking up the actual dangerous people with criminal records. This is the “lock up the guns and let the criminals out” approach.

On February 15, 2018, the day after the Parkland shooting, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed a “criminal justice reform” bill in a vote of 16-5 with overwhelming bipartisan support. In addition to reducing mandatory minimums for hardened career gang members in federal prison, sections 104 and 105 of this bill would reduce the mandatory minimums for those charged with firearms violations during the course of drug offenses or other violent crimes. Crimes involving firearms were the third most common offense in the federal system in recent years.

Lindsey Graham, Richard Blumenthal, Dianne Feinstein, Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin, Kamala Harris, and the whole cast of characters pushing to strip gun rights without due process voted to release gun felons who were convicted after painstaking due process.

Ultimately, the final “First Step” act passed last December didn’t contain these provisions to reduce sentences for gun felons, but it did reduce sentences for repeat drug traffickers, who, in the federal system, are often gang members who commit gun violence but plead down to drug charges. Moreover, the final bill had back-end early release programs that allow career criminals, including gun felons, to get as much as one-third of their time converted to parole.

But let’s not forget that these people wanted to go much further, and if not for people like Sen. Tom Cotton forcing changes to the bill, they would have reduced sentencing for those using guns in furtherance of drug trafficking – the most violent gun felons around. Even former Attorney General Holder agreed that retroactivity should not apply to those who received a mandatory minimum sentence for a firearms offense pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 924(c) or an enhancement for possession of a dangerous weapon under the sentencing guidelines.

Yet Ivanka Trump, who is now working with people like Lindsey Graham to promote gun control, was one of the driving forces behind the jailbreak bill and is continuing to push even more ideas to loosen penalties on federal convicts, who are often the most violent gun felons in the criminal justice system.

This time last year, we were well into the border crisis, which has spawned a massive gang, drug, and criminal alien crisis, not to mention a huge fiscal drain on Americans. Republicans had control of all three branches of government and refused to act on anything from the border wall and drug cartels to sanctuary cities and transnational gangs. Fast-forward to a year later, and they still have done nothing, but they did give Democrats everything they wanted on the budget, which destroyed our leverage on every issue. Now, they finally found an urgency to act on public safety, but only in the exactly wrong way. They have now agreed to the entire premise of the Left on guns.

There is no middle ground. You either believe guns kill and that taking guns away from law-abiding citizens helps public safety, or you believe it is evil people who kill and that letting out bad guys from prison while taking away guns is a recipe for Baltimore. Republicans have long believed the latter, and the issues of guns and crime were the only issues where Republicans have held the line this past generation. Now, in one fell swoop, they have joined the Left on “criminal justice reform,” aka jailbreak, and are attacking guns as the source of the violence problem. The zeal they never exhibited to act on senseless murders committed by people who should never have been in the country is now evident in casting a wide net on constitutional liberties and due process.

In July, I called for Republicans to stay in session all of August to focus on a safety and security agenda for our border and to counter sanctuary cities. Now, while they didn’t decide to come back to town yet, GOP leaders have already tasked members with plans to immediately push for gun control in September, including bills to take away guns without due process while echoing and legitimizing the entire Democrat thesis on this issue. As Rep. Thomas Massie said on my podcast this week, so-called “red flag” laws will violate due process for a large number of people. This is all about going after objects, not dangerous people.