Burn of the Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
I’m a fan of W. Lewis Amselem, who blogs as “Diplomad”. His comment about HRC as Secretary of State was that she wasn’t anti-American in her dispositions and in that respect compared favorably to a large chunk of the Foreign Service. I believe he worked for the State Department from about 1978 to 2011.
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I accept that different lines of work will attract different sorts of people and that some of those differences have a political aspect. When you have ratios of 14 to 1 among rank-and-file employees, it’s a reasonable wager that the dissenters are being pushed out. One of the more unpleasant aspects of our current situation is that the self-understanding of Democrats sustains bad behavior like that in every institution in which they form a critical mass.
When the salesmen don’t believe in the product you’re selling, it’s time for new salesmen.
Trump is not selling a product that a lib believes in. How, therefore, could he effectively sell it???
I’m kind of more annoyed that it was only 200. Those Rubio memes aren’t going to make themselves.
We are all partisans. The only question is for whom. One of the biggest voting blocks for the left side of the aisle is government employees. You don’t really think that President Autopen needed 80,000 IRS employees to audit grandma do you? And why do you think that Virginia turn from a purple state to a blazingly blue state all located right across the Potomac from DC.
Shy of 14% of the total work force consists of government employees. About 20% of the workforce in the jurisdictions around DC are federal employees, v. about 2% in the rest of the country.
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Greater Washington is a large city and large cities considered in toto tend to favor the Democratic Party, with Republicans prospering only in the most peripheral suburbs (e.g. Kane County, Illinois). Greater Washington also has a proportionately large black population (about 30% of the total). The black vote has been monolithic since 1964, though there is some indication that some of their less committed voters are beginning to leave the fold.
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Federal employees have been prevalent in Northern Virginia for decades. My guess is that a more salient factor in making NoVa deep blue has been the influx of foreigners in the last thirty years.
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Issues with the IRS could be addressed to a degree by (1) leaving the agency with the responsibility for collecting income and payroll taxes and distributing the responsibility for collecting other taxes with other bureaux and (2) simplifying the tax codes. Not that either will ever happen.
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We would benefit if recruitment and promotion in all branches of public employment were regulated by impersonal examination series which are administered in a timely fashion and actually screen candidates. It’s important that hiring supervisors not be able to control who lands in the pool to be considered for a position. I’m not seeing why we should nail their feet to their floor thereafter. IMO, three signatures on a letter of termination from those in an employee’s chain of command should suffice to remove him from his position. We might give public employees post termination reviews in front of hearing examiners wherein they and their counsel could present evidence they were fired for one of a half-dozen impermissible reasons. The outcomes of such reviews might be that the employee was awarded an indemnity and the matter referred to an ombudsman to bring a case against his supervisors in front of a different hearing examiner.
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IMO, the President should have plenary discretion to remove a federal employee so long as the President signs his name in pen-and-ink to a letter of termination which names the employee and does so at a hearing attended by members of the public during which the name of each terminated employee is read aloud.
Yes too bad it’s not a thousand. I’m sure they can learn to code or something.
I have a suspicion that the State Department is Parkinson’s Law central. I seem to recall Hyman Rickover estimating that 1/3 of the Defense Department’s civilian employees do the work. The other 2/3 send memos to each other.
Art Deco, I suspect the same is true of every large organization. It certainly was the case in the large corporate bureaucracy I witnessed for 32 years.
Unemployed, woke DNC policy wonks…GreatNews.