Jeff Flake: “I yield myself 1 minute. I offered this amendment to see what the other side would do on this, and just to let this body…”

“I yield myself 1 minute. I offered this amendment to see what the other side would do on this, and just to let this body know how far we are going here. They claim to respect religious liberties and to allow religious visits to Cuba. Yet, when I say let us protect that current exemption that exists, they say we might want to go further. We might want to apply a religious test and, in fact, it is happening right now in Miami. There are groups that are going down under a certain religion, and now we have our own Department of Treasury and the Congress apparently saying we are not sure you are really that religion, we are not sure you really believe that. And so we might restrict that further. In fact, regulations were just issued a few months ago to say that, you know, we think, and this is without approval of Congress, just new regulations saying it ought to only be 25 people that could go at one time. Anything else is unreligious apparently. That is where we are going. It just baffles me to see where we are going here.”