Technically, Schedule F is just a way to make people easier to fire.
If you have people in power who are trustworthy then the ability to fire people could just as easily be used to remove people who are corrupt, incompetent, partisan, etc. If you have people in power who are corrupt, incompetent, and partisan then, yes, you’d expect firings to focus on removing those who are competent and fair.
Power doesn’t equal bad. Bad people with power equals bad.
Making it impossible to do things does mean that you’re safer when bad people are elected. But the better answer is to improve the voting system so that bad people aren’t elected.
I disagree. Regardless of who ends up in charge they will be partisan. It is simply the way that our electoral system works. They may be partisan in a way I like, but that doesn’t matter. They will have the motivation to alter the system to match their policy interests, and even if I agree with their policy it is bad for the system to have the civil service constantly looking over their shoulder to make sure that they don’t arrive at an answer the boss won’t like. Its like Gerrymandering, I may like the results of having districts arranged to favor Democrats, but I still think its bad for democracy.
The reason that the Constitution guarantees us a republic is because it’s accepted as implicit that the people don’t have the time or resources to understand the issues.
If that’s a given then how can the people cast a meaningful vote for any particular political agenda? That’s like you and me getting together to vote why there’s insufficient pressure in the shower, when neither you nor I knows a damn thing about plumbing.
The job that we’re asked to do every 2 or 4 years is to vote whether the people before us seem like reasonable persons, who would work to understand the needs of all of the people in the land, has the intelligence to be able to come to understand the issues, and who will seek to find best compromises to ensure the general welfare.
The whole political angle is something that partisans added, to get us off of the course that we’re supposed to be on and instead, on the course that they want us on.
There’s no one that says we have to allow them to do so. I, for one, don’t see the benefit.
Two issues. First we are talking about value of Schedule F in the system we have, not in some alternative system that not only doesn’t exist here, but probably doesn’t exist anywhere. Second I’m not just talking about partisan in terms of Republican or Democrat political party I am talking partisan in terms of policy. The president will either support or oppose raising taxes, he will support of oppose gun laws etc. If a president strongly supports a specific policy but a civil servant repeatedly publishes high profile reports that argues against it, the president may decide that civil servant is a bad analyst and fire them. That result would be bad for our country, since it would reduce the civil service to a bunch of yes-men.
Now of course if the president was a “reasonable person, who understands the needs of all of the people in the land, has the intelligence to be able to come to understand the issues, and who will seek to find best compromises to ensure the general welfare.” Then maybe he wouldn’t be able to accept the criticism adjust his policies based on it and move forward. But at that point, if we have a system that guarantees such an enlightened leaders, we might was well get rid of all checks on his power and not worry about abuse of any sort.
Trump passed an executive order that commanded the Attorney General of the US to withhold funding from police who practiced violence against perps and suspects. Almost immediately, Bill Barr left his position and Trump was voted out of office. By the time someone had the ability to actually act on the executive order, Merrick Garland was the Attorney General.
Biden neither campaigned on nor took any action towards “Defund the Police”. He completely rejected the idea. But, as it stands, we have a Federal/Executive form of “Defund the Police” in place and it is being underseen by Merrick Garland. Under Trump, the order may have been used - against its stated intent - as a ruse to withhold funding from police stations who didn’t act in a way that Trump wanted. Under Garland, I’d expect that it’s being used to ensure that police agencies are giving their officers violence avoidance classes. Same text, different interpretations and uses.
Only the text, as written, is what the law does. Whether a human uses it as written or largely as a pretext for other things is up to the human. It’s simply factually inaccurate to say that it does some other thing than what it says it does.
Or he will say to that person, thank you very much, your input is valued, then turn to the people in charge of doing the enforcing of the policy and say, nonetheless, my policy is what best serves the public interest, you will enforce as I have instructed, because deciding is my job and doing is yours.
No less venerable an institution than the Wall Street Journal has taken notice of the parallels between Trump 2.0 and Project 2025 – 7min YouTube Video
