State senators backing Trump unfazed by Muslim travel ban proposal (Update)

Donald Trump yesterday announced an entirely unconstitutional and ridiculous proposal to ban all Muslims from entering the country “until we figure out what is going on.” The idea was met with backlash from politicians, including Republicans, advocates, and everyday people.
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? But the support of two Georgia lawmakers who publicly endorsed the presidential hopeful — and as of now, the frontrunner for the GOP nomination — apparently hasn’t wavered. 
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? Mere hours after Trump shocked the world — once again — with the discriminatory proposal, state Sen. Michael Williams, R-Cumming, shared conservative political pundit Erick Erickson’s story, “This is a Brilliant Move by Donald Trump” on Facebook. Erickson called Trump’s idea “brilliant politics” and argued that it established the businessman as the most right-wing candidate of the GOP pack.
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?Williams, co-chair of Trump’s Georgia campaign, says, “until a solution is found,” prohibiting Muslims from entering the country should curb the “growing threats” of radical Islamist violence.
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?“This is not a call to end all future Muslim immigration,” Williams said in a statement he sent to Creative Loafing. “This is a call for strict immigration enforcement during a time of war to protect the people of America.”
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?Williams claimed such a ban would diminish the chance “radicalized Muslims who wish us harm enter our country.” He cited a 2011 poll that reported 7 percent of U.S. Muslims said suicide bombings were “sometimes justified” and a 2015 study that suggested a fifth of Nigerian Muslims had a “favorable view” of ISIS.
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?“These numbers should be frightening to anyone,” he says of the Pew Research Center data he pulled.
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?Williams claims anyone who notes how the travel ban conflicts with that little thing called the U.S. Constitution is missing the big picture.
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?“We cannot put our nation at further risk to appease the politically correct,” he says. “Those who claim this Muslim travel ban unconstitutional overlook an important factor. Who does the U.S. Constitution protect? Last I checked, these rights were reserved for citizens of the United States, not foreign nations.”
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? Trump’s other Georgia backer, state Sen. Burt Jones, R-Jackson, says he hasn’t yet read Trump’s statement but he’s still fully supporting the candidate.
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? “I doubt Trump was speaking of all Muslims, ones that are already here or ones that enjoy their religions like most of us do in a peaceful manner,” he told CL today. (Trump’s proposal was a total ban.)
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? Jones says he supports additional oversight — and potentially even prohibiting entry — for travelers who visited Middle Eastern countries for an extended period of time.  
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? “People who leave our country and go to Syria or Iran or Iraq and Afghanistan and stay for six months and try to come back into the states, I think it’d be foolish not to monitor them or even prevent them from coming back in,” he says. 
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? Jones says Americans are living in a “scary period of time” in which digital media outlets have allowed terrorist groups to conspire and recruit anonymously.
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? “You don’t know who is being influenced by what in their own homes,” Jones says. He says teaming up with “folks that know technology the best,” such as Bill Gates, to possibly “close” the internet, as Trump has proposed, could be a practical way to fight the extremism that he says is “festering like a disease” in the United States. 
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? “It would be a Herculean challenge, I realize, to monitor people who are seeking information on things of terrorist nature,” he says. “But I think you have to leave all options on the table in trying to get your arms around this scary situation.”
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? For the record, no one — not Jones, Trump, Gates, anybody — has the authority to flick the non-existent switch to power down the whole internet. Or even some of it.
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?NOTE: This post has been updated to include state Sen. Michael Williams’ statement.