That is not something from The Onion. That is something Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia actually said this morning when talking about terrorist watch lists.

Manchin is proposing legislation that would prevent anybody who appears on a terrorist watch list from purchasing firearms for a period of five years until they can show they are well behaved. That’s great considering the watch list’s ridiculously high error rate.

Senator Manchin swore as an oath to uphold the constitution and yet here he is complaining about it. Watch:

.@Sen_JoeManchin: Due process is what’s killing us right now https://t.co/OTf9LnxHXZ

— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) June 16, 2016

Transcript:

“The problem we have, and really the firewall we have right now is due process. It’s all due process,” Manchin said during a discussion on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “So we can all say we want the same thing, but how do we get there?

If a person is on the terrorist watch list like the gentleman, the shooter in Orlando, twice by the FBI, we were briefed yesterday about what happened but that man was brought in twice. They did everything they could,” Manchin said. “The FBI did everything they were supposed to do but there was no way to keep him on the nix list or keep him off the gun buy list. There was no way to do that. So can’t we say that if a person under suspicion, there should be a five-year period of time that we have to see if good behavior, if this person continues the same traits, maybe we could come to that type of an agreement. But due process is what’s killing us right now.”

Wow.

And nobody called him out. Yet the same Morning Joe crew wet the bed when Donald Trump proposed his Muslim ban.

How is this any better?