Collecting Power

As the election nears, President Trump has been giving us an ever-clearer picture of what his second Administration would look like, especially if a Republican Senate continued to show no interest in stopping his march toward autocracy.  The President’s ongoing attempts to bring the Cabinet and their departments under his personal control, subject to his personal needs have been accelerating.

A recent example has been the President’s attempts to use “my” Attorney General to discredit the family of his political adversary, Joe Biden.  Citing alleged improper business dealings between Biden’s son, Hunter, and a Ukrainian company, Trump said recently:

“We have got to get the attorney general to act. He’s got to act and he’s got to act fast …  "This is major corruption and this has to be known about before the election.”

The Trump Administration and congressional Republicans have investigated such charges against Hunter Biden several times before, most recently in a Senate committee looking into similar allegations.  Trump’s “new” allegations follow unsubstantiated reports that a laptop purportedly belonging to the younger Biden contains incriminating emails.  Follow-up by mainstream media has found no basis for these reports. 

These allegations are not just wrong, are not just lies.  They are clear steps on the President’s path toward autocracy.  This is how the President thinks his power should be used.  Indeed, it may be just a foretaste of how it will be used if he were to be reelected.

In normal times, a president’s effort to pressure a member of his Cabinet to investigate the family of his political opponent would be extraordinary, especially since the President explicitly invoked the election as reason to do so.  In normal times such a breach of norms would threaten to bring a president down.  But these are not normal times.

A more widespread effort to bring the Executive Branch under the President’s personal control is an executive order issued in October that would remove job security from thousands of civil servants in the federal bureaucracy.  The order

strips long-held civil service protections from employees whose work involves policymaking, allowing them to be dismissed with little cause or recourse, much like the political appointees who come and go with each administration.

On its face, the order seems like a simple corporate attempt to weaken an employee union. 

Civil Service employees saw the ruse immediately.  Ronald Sanders, Trump’s appointee as director of a key advisory council on the civil service, resigned in protest, writing that

[the order] is nothing more than a smoke screen for what is clearly an attempt to require the political loyalty of those who advise the President, or failing that, to enable their removal with little if any due process. …

Sanders continued that this Administration seeks

to replace apolitical expertise with political obeisance. Career Federal employees are legally and duty-bound to be nonpartisan; they take an oath to preserve and protect our Constitution and the rule of law … not to be loyal to a particular President or Administration

I order to understand the importance of Trump’s order, one must understand the difference between civil servants and political appointees.  The former are long-term government employees hired in a competitive process to do the ongoing, day-to-day work of government.  They are expressly nonpolitical and generally maintain their positions from administration to administration.  Their job is safe from political pressure; under normal circumstances they are fired only for inadequate job performance.  They have full union protection. 

Political appointees, on the other hand, serve at the pleasure of the president and generally change with every new administration.  They are expected to bend to the president’s political needs.  They have no union and no job protection.  Trump has, quite legally, used his power to hire and fire at will as a cudgel to keep his political appointees in line.  Cross the President, and you’re in danger of dismissal!

Trump’s order could affect tens of thousands of positions involved in making or carrying out policy.  The new executive order does not actually transform these high-level civil servants into political appointments.  Rather, it subjects these career Federal employees under to political pressure.  Their job as nonpartisan policymakers involves questioning and challenging every step of the policy-making process in order to find the best solutions.  That process, of course, can create tension with their supervising political appointees, who are under pressure from the President.  This has been most recently noticeable in the tension between the professionals at The Centers for Disease and Prevention (CDC) and the Trump-appointed director of the department, Robert Redfield, as he has had to walk a narrow line between CDC professional advice and the President’s needs.

As another example, supposedly objective reports about climate change have sometimes been “edited” before becoming available to the public.

It is appropriate for politically appointed senior staff to try to bring their advice in line with the president’s policy.  It is not appropriate to pressure career civil servants to give false or misleading opinions.  It is doubly inappropriate to threaten their job protections. 

The practical implication of this order for Trump’s (highly unlikely) second term would be frightening.  The President is clearly signaling his intention is to continuing to remove dissenting voices from his administration.  Like any tin-pot “democracy,” the United States’ government and citizens themselves would have less and less access to the truth behind government thinking and actions.  Some whistleblowers, for instance, could find their job at risk this executive orders unlikely to have much practical effect

It is true is that this executive order is unlikely to have much practical effect. The technical details of the order delay possible implementation until the day before the Inauguration, after which Biden would presumably reverse it.  It serves primarily as another example of how low our democracy has descended. 

To be clear, a Trump election victory seems highly unlikely now two days before the election, so the issues may seem irrelevant, but

1. Regardless of the election results, Donald Trump will still occupy his office for the two-and-one-half more months that he is still in office.
2. Many of Trump’s worst offenses are not specific orders or actions but offenses against the unwritten norms of American government.  In too many places, these offenses have seeped down into the political rungs below, for instance, the tendency to demonize political opponents.  (A joint ad by opposing Republican and Democrat candidates for Utah governor is a welcome relief and give us, in contrast, some idea of how far our norms have fallen.)
3. A norm is not a law.  It is not reversed with the stroke of a pen.  Norm-building takes years of decisions in the interest of the country rather than of the “other side.”  It also takes courage to make oneself vulnerable.  To the extent possible public needs to be educated about the importance of norms and reestablishing

After the election, even assuming Trump is defeated, it will important for us as citizens to recognize how far off course our country has deviated.  Reversing all of the changes that the President has wrought will be both extraordinarily difficult and absolutely essential.