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I find myself increasingly perplexed by the people who think a second Trump term would be any kind of a big deal; that there’s anything he’d be able to do in a second term he wasn’t able to do in the first. It’s primarily in fellow right-wingers that I find this attitude most vexing, but it also holds to a lesser degree for the people on the left who hyperbolically opine in outlets like Newsweek and The Economist about how a second Trump term would “end democracy” and “poses the biggest danger to the world.”
Really, it’s not even about Trump for me, either. I don’t really see how a DeSantis or a Ramaswamy presidency would amount to anything either. What can they possibly accomplish, except four years of utterly futile attempts at action that are completely #Resisted by the permanent bureaucracy? Giving “orders” to “subordinates” that prove as efficacious as Knut the Great’s famous command to the tides?
I hear about how the president can do this or that, according to some words on paper, and I ask “but can he, really?” Mere words on paper have no power themselves, and near as I can tell, the people in DC haven’t really cared about them for most of a century now, nor is there any real mechanism for enforcing them.
If I, a random nobody, come into your workplace and announce that you’re fired, of course you still have your job. Security will still let you in when you show up each day, you can still log in and out of whatever, your coworkers will treat you the same, and you’ll still keep getting paid. Now, suppose your boss announces that you’re fired… but everyone else there treats that the same as the first case? You still show up, you still do the work, you still get paid. Are you really fired, then?
First, there are reports that certain Republican orgs have been doing the work to assemble a large list of mid level staffers to install in the federal government for the next president. See NYT article. https://archive.ph/0uVQq
This should have existed in 2016, but clearly that was not the case.
Second, trump has an EO ready to go to reclass a huge percentage of federal enployees as contractors, making them much easier to fire. https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2022/07/trump-reelected-aides-plan-purge-civil-service/374842/
Third, a trump term would distract my political enemies and forestall whatever terrible agenda they are planning to implement. The dystopian liberal democratic order is coming for all of us in the west no matter what at this point. I’ll take four more years of wailing and grinding of teeth from the establishment as a nice sideshow in the meantime.
ROFL at "huge percentage". The article says like 50k positions. There's close to 2M federal employees. And they wouldn't become "contractors"; they'd just be more politically-controlled. There's something like 4k political appointees currently. Going to 50k would be a significant step toward making civil service leadership more politically-accountable when someone actually wins an election, rather than it just being de facto Democrat-controlled, but who knows how deep the rot is. In any event, it's definitely not putting a huge percentage of federal employees on the political chopping block.
You will be surprised how little summary executions are needed especially if you signal that you will keep them for as long as needed.
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Agreed that it's not a huge percentage, but how many of that two million have titles like "Mail Carrier" or "VA Hospital Nurse"? Most of them aren't going to be able to do much to stop anyone's agenda. If they're carefully chosen then 50k could make a big difference. If nothing else it gives you a lot of people in senior positions that can start firing troublemakers pour encourager les autres.
Agreed that they're totally targeting upper management, and this won't affect the vast majority of individual mail carriers/nurses/etc. Could potentially be a significant change in how much an incoming executive can control the Executive branch against #Resistance. The language they're using in their targeting is “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating” positions. My point is that it won't be the vast majority of individual mail carriers/nurses/etc; it won't be a large percentage of overall employees. That's not to say it has no chance of being effective. I have longer and more complicated thoughts on whether/how/where it will be effective or not.
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50k potential federal employees turning over every time a president changes would be a pretty massive change in how the government runs. It would make for excellent fireworks.
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50k more than were there in 2016.
I’m not sure what your point is. Is it hopeless? Maybe. Likely. But what have we got to lose?
I trust trump more than desantis. And Nikki Haley might as well be a democrat in my opinion.
My point is that it's not a "huge percentage". Like, that's my point. A very very simple point. It's not a matter of complicated argumentation. That point is just a dead simple comparison of two numbers. I'm definitely definitely not saying that it's hopeless. I said:
Meaning it does have hope/potential in being effective. A full analysis of the factors for how effective it will be for various agencies is significantly more complicated. But no matter where people come down on that question, it's an extremely simple matter of pointing at two numbers to see that it's not a "huge percentage".
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I don’t get this view. What has DeSantis done that makes your trust Trump more? Trump turned most of the country over to Fauci.
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And my point is that it will be impossible to actually install any of them.
And when the civil service collectively declare this EO illegitimate and ignore it completely?
Exactly my point — nothing getting done is the best we can possibly hope for.
I think this is too far in the other direction. They'd have to come up with some statutory basis that can be argued to, uh, trump it. I think this can be forced down their throats, especially if it's dropped again on Day One of Term Two, rather than in October 2020. The administration will have four years to force out the resisters and a serious mechanism by which to simply fire them and deal with the lawsuit rather than have them playing intransigence for years.
Why? What if they don't?
By whom? Who are going to actually enforce things, against those who disobey?
And again, just who is going to enforce this, and how?
He can pretty easily fire them in that case.
You're very strangely continuing to prod many folks to go all the way toward declaring some form of civil war in some limit, but that's silly and it won't get there. It's the same type of hysteria that led the Blues to imagining scenarios about, "WHAT IF TRUMP JUST IGNORES THE SUPREME COURT AND JUST DEPORTS THE MUSLIMS AND EXECUTES TEH GAYS AND REFUSES TO LEAVE OFFICE AND AND AND AND".... uh, and then we had a reasonably normal presidency with some low-level variance.
Trump fired people before. They went home. Sure, they also went on TV and were lauded with social approval for hating Trump on TV, but they went home from their government job and someone else took their government job. Like, what do you think happens right now if someone just refuses to go home from government property after they get fired from their government job?
Eventually, security evicts them (and the police probably arrest for trespassing), while their former coworkers do nothing to stop it.
But the point is that security won't do this, nor their coworkers. When security keeps letting them in because "they still work here," their coworkers keep cooperating because "they still work here," and payroll keeps paying them because "they still work here," how do they not still work there?
The #Resisters suffer from a coordination game. This is especially difficult, because the firings will likely be one-by-one and entirely focused on the upper/mid-upper level of the bureaucracy. People whose names you don't know. "The most heavily Democratic departments are the EPA, Department of Education, and the State Department, where about 70% of employees are registered to the party." So, Trump sees that, say, the EPA is #Resisting in implementing the EO and slow-walking the naming of new Schedule F positions. EPA has 15 upper management presidential appointees with Senate confirmation. I can't easily find a simple number, but they have a bunch more that are just straight political appointees without Senate confirmation. No one has even remotely suggested #Resistance on the level of, "When Trump fires the old political appointees at this level and appoints new ones, we're going to #Resist, lock the new guys out of the building, and physically fight against security to keep the other guys coming in. Oh, plus, BTW, we need to infiltrate whatever organization manages their pay system to keep the paychecks going (even though that's likely housed in some other agency that just does it for a variety of them)."
So, what does Trump do? First, he goes to his 15 Senate-confirmed appointees and says, "Yo dawgs, you need to file your TPS reports or I'm going to fire you." Do those Senate-confirmed appointees file their TPS reports? If so, problem solved. If not, he starts firing them. Maybe one of the nine sections controlled by an Assistant Administrator is the only one who doesn't file their TPS report. Trump fires him/her or asks him/her if the problem is another political appointee within their section. Fires whoever the problem is. Each of these people almost certainly can carry out the duty of listing the new Schedule F slots pretty much on their own, if they have to.
But okay, you say, the #Resistance will come when Trump fires the Assistant Administrator for Environmental Information. Everybody in the Environmental Information department is up in a tizzy and is using every tool in their toolbox to prevent the Assistant Administrator from filing his/her TPS report. Two things to note. First, the Assistant Administrator for Environmental Information is already a bloody Trump appointee! It was already someone that Trump picked to do that job! How many #Resisters are going to fight security to protect a Trump appointee?! This is a position that has been a political appointment for essentially forever; this is a position where no one across the upper management of the entire civil service would claim can not be simply fired and replaced by a new appointee. Second, #Resisters in other agencies or outside government have no bloody clue who this person is. They have a horrid coordination game to play. They have to somehow coordinate enough people inside and outside the agency to all simultaneously put their necks out in open defiance of the way things have always been done, they way that they're claiming to argue is the way it should still be done, but that they're all going to simultaneously literally be willing to fight security to keep one nameless Trump appointee over some other nameless Trump appointee. Gimme a freaking break. Ain't no chance. You'll see some ridiculous article in the Times about "trouble in the EPA", as Trump is "endangering the future of the climate" by futzing with some no-name at the EPA, but there is zero chance that you're going to coordinate that many people to physically #Resist to protect one upper/mid-level Trump appointee that everyone acknowledges he can just fire and replace.
If they don't do that, problem solved. We have a new Assistant Administrator for Environmental Information, and that new guy files his friggin' TPS report. If they do it, he can just bring in security from one of the other agencies, take his pick from the most loyal, and either the current security guys (probably literally nobodies who were hired on contract from the private sector at the "lowest cost", drawn from a very different portion of the population than EPA upper/middle management) will physically fight them to prevent them from taking over security for the building or, again, problem solved.
The only reason why there was ever the chance of having as much hullabaloo as the FBI director had was because (a) for better or worse, everyone knew who Jim Comey was, so they could reasonably coordinate around an individual they trusted, (b) they had at least a fig leaf of the idea of independence in the position from the statute, and (c) they had the rhetoric of an independent investigation into Trump, himself. They won't have any of that here. They would have to simultaneously show up to violate the law, risking prison for themselves, in a huge coordination game, to protect some nobody upper/mid-level Trump appointee. Ain't no bloody chance. The TPS report will get filed, even if the head Administrator (also hand-picked by Trump) just has to write the names of positions on the damn TPS report himself. If anything, it gives the top Trump appointee the chance to target anyone in the organization who gives him even a whiff of #Resistance. Then, when that lower-level guy gets fired and replaced by a new Schedule F guy, the #Resisters will have to play an even worse coordination game for an even lower-level nobody, all putting their own cushy jobs (and possibly their freedom) on the line.
Why would they need to? Security will be the ones helping them "lock the new guys out of the building" and "keep[ing] the other guys coming in."
No they won't, because, in a sense, they already have. Even if it's "some other agency," it's still fully-captured, still staffed by the same sort of people, in full agreement. The managers of their pay system will side with them automatically. It's all one big, totally-captured Permanent Bureaucracy, the "separate parts" in lock-step with one another.
How does that solve the problem?
Again, how do they enforce this duty?
So Trump fires a political appointee whose nominal subordinates refuse to obey, and replaces them. What prevents the agency from continuing to #Resist the new Trump appointee?
Who are just as captured and will side with them against a Republican president. The whole point is that nobody is going to obey. Every group with the power to enforce any firings outside the direct appointment level is already part of the #Resistance, and are going to side with their fellow Defenders of Our Democracy against Cheeto Hitler's ordering them to help make him Führer.
How so? Who's going to arrest them?
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Eventually, the national guard. But it won’t proceed that far because blue tribe bureaucrats in NoVa are not Islamic fundamentalists. They are risk averse and very wealthy people with opposite political leans to trump who won’t take their chances on national guardsmen hauling them out of the office on their ass and prosecuting them for trespassing on government property.
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