a friend had to go through a very strict background check just to visit a building used by the IRS. The security was very tight .
I’m with Ravenman and gnoitall on this one. Giving the government control over such an opaque process as security clearance approval to be able to decide who can run for office is a bad, BAD idea.
ETA: I prefer government by the people, for all its messiness, to government by the OPM every day of the week.
We could compromise: Every candidate is required to apply for a clearance, and the Office of Clearance-Issuing (whatever you call it) states publicly whether they got it or not. The people would then be free to decide whether that information was relevant for their voting decisions.
I’m baffled as to why anyone thinks that the government should be telling voters who and who is not suited to hold office, whether the evaluation is made on a candidates alleged ability to keep secrets, uphold ethical principles, attends church regularly enough, smiles in a weird way, or anything else.
The very act of running for President is FAR, FAR more intrusive than any security clearance investigation, with the exception of a small number of matters like drug testing and for certain positions, polygraphs. There are scores of journalists poring through everything a candidate has ever done, and coming up with far more dirt on people than what an SSBI can be expected to come up with. Furthermore, journalists publish most of what they find – the public ends up waaaaaaaay more informed.
This whole notion of the government investigating candidates is such a dangerous, terrible, and stupid idea that I really cannot believe that anyone would truly endorse it but for having political axes to grind. (Just like how conservatives used to complain about Bill Clinton having once gone to Russia, therefore should not be allowed to be President because security clearance blah blah.)
And yet, horrifying new revelations are coming out about Trump every week. Apparently those scores of journalists aren’t doing such a great job after all, or they would have found all of this before the election.
Ultimately, a background investigation is intended to evaluate the character of the applicant. It is not intended to be a compilation of everything good and bad a person has done. That’s the job of God and Santa Claus.
If you don’t think that Americans knew much about Donald Trump’s character before the election, I just don’t know what to tell you.
There was quite a bit of this that was known before the election, and quite frankly, much of the most damning issues occurred during the election and largely by people affiliated with the campaign, so that these issues are coming to light only over the last year is more of a consequence of the stories starting to gel rather than journalists not doing a proper job.
Regardless, allowing the government to dictate who can or cannot hold office based upon a security background check would be inviting abuse and corruption from the executive branch in excluding candidates that the ruling political party wants to deny, and I suspect would also run afoul of Consitutional challenge since passing some kind of security check is not in the short list of requirements for President. There were certainly plenty of other reasons to not vote for Trump (his total inexperience in government, his abusive behavior and language, his refusal to divulge financial information or commit to divesting himself of business conflicts, his open bigotry, his advocacy for ‘policy’ positions that made no fiscal or strategic sense or could even be remotely practicable, his mumblety-fuck manner of speechthat is totally discordant to what is expected from a world leader, his tiny han…nope, too easy) any yet somewhat less than half the voters representing slightly more than half the Electoral College votes voted for him anyway, in large part because of the “Anyone but Hillary” meme that owes much of its manufactured outrage to what turned out to be Russian interference and social media manipulation which the Obama Administration was aware of but did not disclose in detail publically to aver from being accused of partisan hackery. (Whether the latter was a good decision or not is something for the historians to address, but I think President Obama and his advisors checked the winds of public opinion and decided that it would feed more unrest than correction, and hoped that the general public would be smarter than they apparently are.)
I don’t think the response to external interference should be to weaken the essential elements of representitive democracy and give unelected-and-potentially-biased government functionaries the opportunity to delegitimize candidates based upon an interpretation of suitability, even if that is ostensibly based on some objective criteria. Because if we did that, it goes without saying that the first person they would go after would be Joe Exotic. He’s broke as shit, and he’s not going to cut his hair, so he has less chance of passing a background check than Merrick Garland has of getting on the Supreme Court.
Stranger
(cleaned up that URL)
Holy shit. If that dude talks about cleaning up the swamp, I’d believe him, because I think he owns an actual swamp and has the know how to turn it into a habitat for some kick-ass animals.
It sounds like a variant of what happens in both Russia and Iran, where the government gets to decide if a candidate should be allowed to stand for election.
In Iran, a candidate has to meet the theological standards set by the mullahs. In Russia, a would-be candidate was disqualified from the recent presidential election because of a corruption charge.
Candidates shouldn’t have to meet tests set by the government as a condition to run, other than purely objective one like age and citizenship.
So it’s not a problem if a Russian mole gets elected President? Yeah, I’m not alright with that.
I’m not either, but we have only ourselves to blame. Well, for a value of “ourselves” that means “the citizens of this country”.
I too had TS-SCI clearance when I was in the Navy and not-SCI for my job at a military contractor immediately after and never took a polygraph test.
One of the things scrutinized closely when one is considered for clearance are the associates and family ties (i.e. spousal). If someone married a girl from Taiwan, his clearance would get yanked if she had family on the mainland. Hell, one acquaintance had his duties limited because he married a Scottish girl. I doubt Donny Two-scoops would pass that inquiry.
I’m not certain Obama would have passed it either.
On what basis?
I’m not an adjudicator, but I think Obama would easily get a TS. His drug use wasn’t recent and ongoing, didn’t have any financial problems or blackmail worthy events in his past, and has no reason to believe there are split loyalties to another country.
I guess if the adjudicator thought he was a secret Muslim terrorism he’d be in trouble.
I was thinking about his relationship with Bill Ayers and his past drug use.
what relationship did he have with Bill Ayers? Not counting sources like Alex Jones or Breitbart or Drudge.
I quite strongly think both are non-issues as far as a clearance is concerned, so long as he was honest in answering the SF-86 and any investigator’s questions. Quite frankly, I can’t even imagine the scenario under which Bill Ayers would even come up. I say this as someone who has an extremely funny story in my past that I wished would come up during my SSBIs, and I always wanted an investigator to get a big laugh out of it, but sadly, I have not had the chance, because the general topic - which people with a certain political point of view would be quick to criticize me about - just isn’t in the realm of what investigators actually care about.