During an appearance on Meet The Press Sunday, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) repeated his call for profiling Muslims in the name of public safety, stating that although most Muslims are “outstanding people,” the threat of terrorism still stems from “the Muslim community.” Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), America’s first Muslim congressman, quickly shot down that line of thinking, arguing that blanket profiling doesn’t serve the needs of law enforcement and actually undermines effective investigations by unnecessarily straining public resources.

Ellison detailed the shortcomings of King’s approach, stressing that individual behavior and actionable evidence should form the basis of terrorism investigations. He also compared King’s strategy to the similarly misguided policies that the American government adopted towards Japanese Americans during World War II.

Watch it:

King also asked why law enforcement hadn’t made interrogations of the Boston bombers’ mosque a higher priority, prompting host David Gregory to ask what, exactly, investigators could have asked before the bombings had occurred. King responded by repeating that such interrogations had not occurred due to “political correctness” concerning the treatment of Muslims in America.

King’s calls for profiling against Muslims is certainly nothing new. The New York congressman has been using the Boston bombings as justification for increasing surveillance of American Muslim communities, and he previously led a series of infamous congressional hearings into the potential radicalization of Muslims in America. The NYPD’s enhanced surveillance of Muslim communities, made public by an Associated Press investigative series in 2012, found that the department’s actions had “a severe chilling effect on speech, religious activity, and community life” while failing to yield a single piece of actionable intelligence.

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) on Thursday stressed the need for more openness surrounding the Obama administration’s targeted killing program and the drones used to carry it out.

During an appearance on MSNBC, Ellison highlighted the need to set up an open legal architecture surrounding the program currently in operation in Yemen and Pakistan. That position falls in-line with both the sentiments of Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and CAP Chair John Podesta’s recent op-ed in the Washington Post.

Ellison said he agreed with Podesta that the administration needs to go further to help set norms for the use of drones around the world:

JANSING: We should say the President did allow some members of the intelligence committee to see those memos, are you satisfied with that? Is it enough?

ELLISON: No, it’s not enough. I think Podesta is absolutely right on this issue. I don’t think the president has anything to fear. He’s the one who said let’s have a legal architecture. This is a chance for the United States to really lead the world. [...] We should lead the way. The President should not allow himself to be coming up on the backside of this. He should be helping to lead this effort.

Watch Ellison’s full interview here:

At present, the program’s full legal justification — including the administration’s interpretation of when Americans can be targeted overseas — is being held closely by the White House, which has so far ignored calls to declassify the Justice Department’s memos. While it allowed the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence view the memos as part of the deal to confirm CIA Director John Brennan, the White House sent staffers to sit with the committee members during their review, a move that Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) strongly objected to. “There was a minder who was sent in. I was unaware that that person was going to have to be there. It was an insult to me,” he said.

Speaking behind closed doors with the Senate Democratic Caucus, Obama indicated that he were he still in the Senate he would have “probably objected” to the White House’s continued secrecy as well.

Earlier this week, Ellison in his role as co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus signed onto a letter from House Democrats to President Obama calling for the release of those documents to the full Congress. Ellison also expressed wariness surrounding the use of armed drones in combat in general, stating that there are legitimate and illegitimate ways in which they can be utilized. “We should only use this sort of technology in the circumstances to protect American lives to do so,” Ellison said. “But I think that the technology has outrun the rules.” Calling back to his previously published op-ed on the matter, Ellison said that he was glad that the conversation in Washington had finally shifted to oversight over the targeted killing program.

Last night on his Comedy Central show, Steven Colbert mocked Rep. Michele Bachmann’s (R-MN) anti-Muslm charges that the U.S government is supposedly being infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood. “I admire” Bachmann’s campaign, Colbert said, adding, “Exhibit A: Did you know that the congressional cafeteria serves crescent rolls? That is nothing more than warm buttery jihad.” Colbert then ridiculed Newt Gingrich for praising McCarthyism to defend his support of Bachmann:

COLBERT: Yes it takes a brave man to randomly accuse someone of something horrible based on no evidence and then demand they refute the evidence that you don’t have. So tonight, I am accusing Newt Gingrich of being a baby eating werewolf.

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Colbert also interviewed Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), who has led the charge in Congress against Bachmann’s baseless witch-hunt. Ellison confirmed to Colbert that he is Muslim and has siblings. “So you are literally a Muslim brother,” Colbert joked, “You realize I just caught you. I caught you in a lie.” Watch the interview here:

Despite criticism from leading Republicans over their attacks on a notable senior aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a group of House Republicans conducting a witch hunt on government officials supposedly linked to the Muslim Brotherhood are doubling down on their accusations.

The group, led by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), has yet to provide actual evidence of the “infiltration” they say is occurring, and the attacks on Huma Abedin, a long-time and well-known Clinton aide, drew ridicule from across Washington and highlighted the shoddiness of the entire report. But the lawmakers aren’t giving up, The Hill reports:

Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) told The Hill that the media’s focus on Abedin was a “deliberate effort to change the subject.”

“The focus in the media has been on one sentence in one of those letters, and … they have the right to do that,” Franks said. “But it certainly doesn’t serve the American people when they overlook the central focus of the letters to try to take out of context one element of it that seems to be the only thing the left can aim at.”

Reps. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Tom Rooney (R-FL), and Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA) all made similar points in refusing to apologize for their comments, and Bachmann went a step farther Thursday, launching a new attack on Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), who has led the fight against the group of lawmakers’ ridiculous report.

While Republicans like Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) have dismissed Bachmann’s absurd attacks on Abedin and others as the witchhunt it is, others, like Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) have backed the group as being “concern[ed] about the security of the country.”

Tell Speaker Boehner to remove Bachmann from the House Intelligence Committee before her reckless politics damage our national security.

The controversy over Rep. Michele Bachmann’s (R-MN) Islamophobic witch-hunt was kicked off by a series of letters from her and colleagues demanding that the Inspectors General of four government agencies investigate “deep penetration” by the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S. government. But during an interview with Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), CNN’s Anderson Cooper reported that two of the agencies have no intention of launching investigations.

During the interview, Cooper said:

We called the inspectors general involved here. Two of the five [sic] agencies, the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department, told us they had no plans to investigate. And both were clear that a request like this is outside the inspectors general mandate, saying that they look at the effectiveness of programs. They look for waste, fraud, abuse.

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Bachmann, though, isn’t backing down. Yesterday on Glenn Beck’s show, she doubled down on her allegations — despite a rising tide of Republican and right-wing repudiations of her Islamophobic attacks.