Again I must emphasize that we’re only discussing Schedule A and C billets. The vast majority of workers are civil service, and are not appointed. They are competitively hired and promoted, and enjoy protection against religious discrimination.
Would you care to discuss the application of 5 USC §§ 3345 and 3349a to your “hold out” plan?
Yip. The law makes excuses for the very things it set out as being illegal. This is why blindly following the law is evil.
There are way too many exceptions for the President, which just guarantees corruption and thus undermining democracy itself.
And people wonder why I’m not assured that Trump’s power is limited. He gets a grand exception to everything.
Hence why I pray for him to die.
I guess I’d just have to go with that being a huge oversight, then. Or, judging by that Spagnola v. Mathis bit, a deliberate omission.
Not to put too fine a point on it; that seems like some amazing bollocks. I guess the endpoint of this whole conversation is not so much “Sessions is against the First Amendment” and more “Turns out that actually the President and select advisors can just be racist/sexist/generally bigoted pieces of shit as regarding their appointments with no legal impediment.” I’m glad that doesn’t apply to civil service posts, per your post that I see on preview. It’s still pretty terrible. I really don’t like the kind of precedent this kind of exception creates, either.
But it’s not necessarily a hill to die on – it’s as simple as voting no, and pointing out why. No need to throw a fit about it – just make a simple and clear statement. Not terribly common for politicians, but I think it ought to be.
Well, you must have been aware on some level that the selection of Cabinet members was immune from these laws, right? I mean, you’ve never heard of someone suing for appointment as the Interior Secretary by claiming that although she was more qualified, the President nonetheless appointed a white male to the position, yes?
By the same token (no pun intended) you must have thought that the same exceptions existed for Deputy and Assistant Secretary positions, right?
There are roughly 1,200 positions that are appointed by the President and require Senate confirmation and are exempt from competitive job protections. These include the Cabinet Secretaries, Deputy and Assistant positions, the DOD armed service secretaries and deputy positions, the independent agencies (including obscure spots like the Federal Co-Chairman of the Delta Regional Authority) and then the previously mentioned 1,100 support positions that don’t require Senate approval and are appointees by the appointees, so to speak. All told, we’re talking about less than 3,000 staff positions.
It really cannot be done any other way. The President needs a team at the Commerce Department that he selects, not a team that is the result of a court-ordered battle on who is the most qualified to be Commerce Secretary. The career civil service is there to implement policy; the key leadership is there to develop policy based on the President’s goals.
There are roughly 2.8 million federal civil service employees. Roughly 3,000 of them are appointees exempt from competitive protection rules. The courts have shown no inclination to right the unrightable wrong, here, and neither has Congress.
And the leadership of the Justice Department in the meantime falls to someone that Trump appoints anyway, with no Senate input, and rolls along for 300 days, after which his deputy takes over for 210 days, also without Senate input.
You’re so concerned about not getting a bigot against atheists in that you’re willing to (a) let a bigot against atheists run the department anyway, and (b) accept the likelihood that he’s a bigot in other respects.
In other words: The Justice Department doesn’t shutter its doors. Trump picks a guy to run it, and he does, while the Senate (guided by your advice, anway) votes down a series of more palatable options.
This seems to be a classic case of making the perfect the enemy of the good.
So what’s the use if someone legally discriminates, right? Why bother investigating or publicizing what is morally and ethically wrong but legally correct in an effort to raise public awareness and apply pressure-“It’s legal!”
If the best you can say is “Support them because technically they didn’t break the law”, then maybe your best isn’t good enough.
Is there such a thing as “Praising with faint damnnation”?
Yet you would do exactly that if the guy was a Klan member. Some of us see this as just as bad.
No- it’s more of a case of “Don’t do anything because it’s not that bad and even if it is, it could be worse.”
That’s a possibility, but it’s also possible that your stance inspires (or opens the door for) other Senators to also stand up to this bigotry, and for society to have a larger discussion about the issue. And maybe it even motivates the President to nominate someone without this bigotry.
I think this chance is worth it. But we disagree, obviously.
I wouldn’t rely on my lack of memory of such an event to be illustrative, to be honest. I’ve never heard of a lot of things which have happened. I must confess that I had no idea at all that the selection of Cabinet members was immune from those laws.
Lack of a lawsuit, even assuming I knew of it, doesn’t seem like a guarantee of no laws covering the situation, anyway. Part of what we’re discussing is the difficulty of proving that any particular appointment results from a discriminatory process if that process isn’t out in the open.
Bigger than 3, smaller than 300,000.
And here is where my concern about precedent comes in; any CEO could well argue that same thing. A CEO is not as important as a President, of course, but it being important enough to not have a court-ordered battle is a matter of opinion.
This could easily be argued the other way based on the same logic. The President needs a team at the Commerce Department that is competent in order to develop policy based on his goals. Competency being sacrificed for bias would be an impediment to that. You might argue; competency is not a yes or no characteristic, and even a President who picks only atheist appointments who are less competent than alternatives still may get competent enough people. But that same problem of the gradient applies also to the extent to which there are “court-ordered battles”. Both are, on sliding scales, impediments to the President’s effecting of his goals.
Yes; it absolutely can be done another way. The difference isn’t success vs. failure; it’s visible failure and invisible failure. This being politics, perhaps that’s why the law takes one into account and not the other.
3,000 is a smaller number than 2.8 million.
Have the courts defined this as an “unrightable” wrong? Congress, too?
Yes, but I explained the reason I felt that doing the same thing to a KKK nominee would not be as unproductive.
Congress explicitly excluded those positions from the legal protections available to all other government jobs, and the courts have cited that exclusion when asked to fashion remedies independent of the law.
So, yes. Or at least defined it as, “We’re not going to right it.”
Pardon, but that would be “unrighted” not “unrightable”.
Edit: Even with your edit, that’s still “unrighted”, not “unrightable”.
I suppose “unrighted,” is more accurate. I chose the phrase “right the unrightable wrong,” as an allusion to the Don Quixote character in the musical Man of La Mancha; he sings in “The Impossible Dream,” that his quest is to, among other things, right the unrightable wrong.
Because most of the country shares the same prejudice? Surely that can’t be the guide. I’ve heard that most of Nazi Germany was okay with discrimination against the Jews. The whole point of having character (and morals) is to do the right thing when it doesn’t get you anything.
I understand the phrase “pick your battles,” and I generally agree that it makes sense politically and is often even a moral choice. However, if you won’t pick this particular battle over a nominee who doesn’t believe a person is fit to serve his country because he doesn’t worship the same god (or any god), then I don’t know where you’d draw the line. (Well, I guess I do know where, but it seems like a funny place to do it)
Given I’m the one suggesting it be righted, I think that would technically make me the insane idealist in this allusion. 
Am I tilting at windmills?
In my view? Yes.
There are 100 senators.
How many do you think would be on board for this?