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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?
I think the intended difference is that there’s lists of appointees for a second trump admin who are competent and effective and who will have the ability to sideline resistance libs in the civil service.
To what extent that’s true I don’t know; my impression is that at least some of trumps issues with getting stuff done were just his tendency to ask for the impossible and fire high level officials for not doing it.
Except, isn't the whole argument of things like Michael Lewis's "Fifth Risk," and all the talk of "Trump-proofing" Federal hiring and firing that any right-wing appointee, by disagreeing with the existing left-wing "expert consensus," thereby proves himself "not an expert," thereby not "competent and effective," but a "partisan hack" who "has no idea how our government works," and thus whose appointment would constitute "a government under attack by its own leaders," to be resisted by any means necessary?
And how does anyone "sideline" over two million people?
There are two million people in the civil service, but how many of those actually need to be sidelined?
To start with, there’s lots of janitors, low level auditors, air traffic controllers, secretaries, etc. employed by the federal government. Obviously these people don’t generate policy, and they don’t really enforce it either.
Then on the enforcement wing, you’ve got lots of cops who are mostly not resistance libs. Yes, there’s EPA permitting officers and DOJ lawyers, but you can tell a lot of them to sit in a corner by the simple expedient of not assigning them any work. Ken Paxton as attorney general brings with him an inner circle which can take over most of the DOJ lawyers’ jobs at the cost of some mild corruption- and the rest of it can be assigned to the compliant dozen or so. It’s a very small portion of people which need to be moved to rubber rooms, and there are already people listed to replace them.
There are two million people in the civil service, but how many of those actually need to be sidelined?
Pretty much all of them, given that AIUI they are > 95% solidly left-wing.
Disagree, at least at the Federal level — and even if they aren't all resistance libs, most of the rest are the sort who will follow whatever orders given because they've got bills to pay and can't lose their precious, precious pension.
And when they refuse to do so? Or even refuse to acknowledge the one doing the assigning or lack thereof?
And when the DOJ collectively refuse to recognize Paxton's appointment or authority, have him and his "inner circle" locked out of the building, and proceed on without them?
You are grossly overestimating how politically motivated and left-wing the average fed is. Federal employees organizations are overwhelming Democratic (unsurprisingly, given the GOP's traditional hostility to organized labor and the Democrats' favorability); actual federal employees are nowhere near as unanimous. Here is a Gallup poll surveying the partisan alignment of Federal employees (among other things). It's older than I'd like, but it illustrates the point. If anti-Trump civil servants tried to coordinate a strike against his administration they'd just fail.
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