Denied due process.
Waiting on a routine flight from Sacramento back to Santa Barbara, Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., discovered he was a terrorist. Or at least that’s what the FBI thought.
McClintock was clearly more of a frequent flyer than radical extremist. But a classic case of mistaken identity, not ties to terrorism, landed him on the FBI’s no-fly list.
A well-known state senator at the time, McClintock was left stranded at the Sacramento International Airport about 10 years ago. He couldn’t fly home to Santa Barbara under his own name.
Pointing to gaffes like the one that grounded McClintock a decade ago, Republicans now warn of serious constitutional consequences that could occur if Democrats banned suspects on the no-fly list from purchasing guns.
“If your fundamental constitutional rights can be withdrawn at a bureaucrat’s whim” without due process, McClintock argues, “then the Bill of Rights means nothing.”
Democrats in Congress disagree.
After an Islamist-inspired gunman murdered 49 people at a nightclub in Orlando, Democrats launched an effort to close what they characterize as “the terrorist loophole.” They want to block suspected terrorists on the no-fly list from buying guns—legal purchases that President Obama describes as “insane.”[…]
Eventually he managed to remove his name from the list but only after the California Senate spent months working with federal officials to clear his name.
The government had confused him, McClintock later learned, with a known terrorist in the Irish Republican Army.
McClintock has never visited Ireland, though. And, the California conservative adds with a laugh, he is “not now and never have been” associated with any insurgent Irish independence movement.