Hasnât the same thing happened at Interior and EPA and no doubt in every other department? And I think there are some whistle blower law suits or other actions going on.
I swear there are days when I want to swing on Republican acquaintances for having done this to our country.
Another disgraceful abuse of power by a fundamentally lawless Executive Branch.
Wow, our own American Great Leap Forward! Professors will be sent out to replace migrant workers. Doesnât sound so improbable these days, right?
OT: McConnell is crowing about how now 1/8 of all federal judges are Trump appointees. And then thereâs this - no more blue slips. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/17/us/politics/republicans-democrats-judicial-nominations.html?module=WatchingPortal®ion=c-column-middle-span-region&pgType=Homepage&action=click&mediaId=thumb_square&state=standard&contentPlacement=4&version=internal&contentCollection=www.nytimes.com&contentId=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2018%2F05%2F17%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Frepublicans-democrats-judicial-nominations.html&eventName=Watching-article-click
When the trash is swept out of the White House we can put them all to work putting rocks back on land so the sea level will drop back to normal.
Remember that week when every Republican and Fox Newstalker were going on and on about how totally âlawlessâ Obama was?
Terri Gross had Evan Osnos from the New Yorker on today. This is the most damning point:
So weâve been talking about some of the people who have been marginalized, sent to the so-called turkey farm in the Trump administration because they were considered irrelevant or because they worked on Obama-era policies, and Trump doesnât feel like they will be loyalists to him. Thereâs a way to appeal if youâre a civil servant who thinks that youâve been mistreated, but thereâs a catch right now if you want to appeal. Would you explain the catch?
OSNOS: Yeah. The way that you appeal, if youâre a civil servant who feels that youâve been mistreated, is you file your complaint to whatâs called the Merit Systems Protection Board. You know, this is an institution. Itâs almost - acts in a sort of semijudicial way. They render judgments, and they can give people benefits, and settlements and so on. The only problem is that the Merit Systems Protection Board has been paralyzed for the last 15 or 16 months because right before Donald Trump took office, one of its officers stepped down. And by law, it needs to have two officers in place in order to function, and it was now beneath that level. And therefore, it essentially ground to a halt.
So there was, you know, one officer left, and he was continuing to do his work. He - the complaints would come in, and he would try to read them and mark them up with notes, but basically, they were just piling up in an office. I went by not long ago, and he showed me these cartons of complaints coming in. And they were just, you know, up to your shoulder level, these great piles of paper that were, you know, in a sense, a kind of symbol of the ways in which the lives of civil servants - the - you know, the main body of the American government - had entered this strange holding pattern. There was just no way to get them adjudicated.
And then the story takes one more turn, which is that finally, in March of this year, the Trump administration did appoint somebody, so that meant that the office could return to normal operations. But what it turned out was that they had appointed somebody to fill the spot of the one officer in place, not to fill the vacancies. And that meant that all the work that he had done over the course of the last year and some months was now legally void and had to be chucked out. So thereâs now a backlog of about 900-plus cases that will take several years to work through before civil servants can be granted any kind of relief. And for advocates of civil servants, people who are worried about the function and competence of the American government, they say, you know, we think this was deliberate, that this was a kind of sabotage by the White House to discourage other civil servants from filing complaints. If they knew that the board was paralyzed, that would basically prevent them from complaining at all.
From:
The normal English translatoin of the Bannonite term, âdeep stateâ is âskilled professionals trying to do their jobs in an impartial and unbiased manner.â As opposed to the old way of the spoils system, rigging every government agency with partisan hacks. These clowns better hope Teddy Roosevelt (a RINO) doesnât come back with Abraham Lincoln (also a RINO), to explain things to them with big sticks and split rails.
This admin is a fucking travesty.
The gutting of State was in full swing 13 months ago, but our attention was elsewhere.
Dismantling indeed. Never thought I would be saying something like this, but here it is: When itâs all said and done â may take years â weâll learn that this is being done as part of Trumpâs deal with Putin to weaken the USâs diplomatic footprint and efficiency around the globe.
Sounds like Trump.
And they wonder why they have problems such as NK not coming to the table, or problems with our allies. Our foreign policy really sucks.
When youâre waging a war on competence, this is natural.
A Sunday Bizarro cartoon a few weeks ago - In front of the White House the founding fathers came back from the dead to hold a press conference. âItâs obvious why we returned. Next question, please.â
A close friend of mine works over there and started talking about this last year as many of his most talented colleagues got sent to the salt mines (aka FOIA office) to do menial labor. Heâs keeping his head down, doing the minimum so as to not draw attention (good or bad) and is devastated on a daily basis watching all the good people and good work being decimated by this incompetent, callous and corrupt administration.
Itâs worse than we know.
This administration canât conceive of individuals who are professionals and consider public service to be just that: serving the public regardless of who is in power. The present mal-administration looks at every issue and action in terms of âwhatâs in it for me?â They apparently think public service means the public, including federal workers, subserviently serve only them. They firmly believe they are entitled to collect the spoils of office for themselves and their friends. Period.
It wonât be long before government is drowned in a bathtub. Grover Norquist must be proud.
âGovernmentâ will be just fine. It is the Republican party which needs to be worried about being drowned⌠in a thimble.
As for Grover⌠my suggestion could result in an investigation, so I wonât make it.
But it is similar to a scene in Billy Bathgate involving cement galoshes.