Months ago, Tennessee Republicans proposed some of the most radical "anti-Sharia" legislation in the country, a bill that would have allowed them to label observant Muslims terrorists because they adhered to Muslim religious requirements. Conservatives had recently tried to block the construction of a mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, by filing a suit in court, arguing that the builders were part of a conspiracy to impose Sharia law on the U.S. and that Islam wasn't really a religion. The new bill would allow Islamophobes to bypass the courts altogether by giving Tennessee's government the authority to simply declare future potential mosque builders terrorists for "supporting sharia."
After a local outcry, the bill's sponsors altered it so that it resembled federal laws allowing the feds to "designate" certain groups as terrorist organizations and go after their financial assets. Except the federal government can only do that for foreign groups, and so the Tennessee proposal would likely not only have been unconstitutional, but it would have interfered with the federal government's anti-terrorism efforts.
The bill ultimately passed -- but only after it was significantly altered. After consulting with officials from the federal government, the bill was amended to take out the "designation" authority. By granting the state of Tennessee powers reserved for the federal government, this likely would have been the most far reaching "anti-Sharia" legislation in the country.
The final version was hashed out behind closed doors between bill sponsors and high-level administrators in the Department of Safety and Office of Homeland Security. They stripped down the bill, deleting provisions that would have let the governor and attorney general designate possible terrorists and deny the accused the right to fight the classification before an administrative law judge.
They agreed to give the existing law more teeth and allowed for local district attorneys to report suspicions directly to the Department of State, which handles terrorist designations, instead of reporting to the FBI.
The relevant amendment, which you can read here, removes the bill's most objectionable elements, and in doing so makes it mostly useless to the Sharia-conspiracy theorists responsible for the original bill.
