The Democrats Must Stop Ceding the Security State to Republicans
James Comey never should have been FBI director in the first place.
BY BRIAN BEUTLER
December 12, 2016
Whether he was working as a partisan operative or not, it’s true that Comey is a Republican. And irrespective of his intentions, it is very unlikely that he would have conducted himself the way he did if he weren’t.
There is a lesson here for Democrats, as they contemplate a future return to power. Comey wasn’t a holdover from the Bush administration. President Barack Obama nominated him to run the FBI. His decision is consistent with the Democratic Party’s larger, cowed deference to the GOP when it comes to running the country’s national security bureaucracy. This old habit can’t die soon enough.
It’s no secret that the military, the FBI, and other security services skew right wing. This partially explains why Democrats frequently select Republicans to run the Pentagon and why the FBI has never been run by a liberal. Appointing Republican bureaucrats is one way to avoid dissension during periods of Democratic rule.
But this—the capture of powerful arms of the government by partisan or ideological cohorts—is a toxic development and one no party should tolerate in perpetuity. Republicans certainly don’t. When they come to power, they don’t cede control of bureaucracies with more progressive missions to Democrats. To the contrary, they send vicious foes of progressive politics to run these agencies—the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Labor, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development—and start cleaning house.
https://newrepublic.com/article/139272/democrats-must-stop-ceding-security-state-republicans?utm_content=buffer7d5cc&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
The whole article is well worth reading.