This doesn’t make me nervous at all. No, sir. Not me. From the AP:
Tom Jones and his American Accountability Foundation are digging into the backgrounds, social media posts and commentary of key high-ranking government employees, starting with the Department of Homeland Security. They’re relying in part on tips from his network of conservative contacts, including workers. In a move that alarms some, they’re preparing to publish the findings online. With a $100,000 grant from the Heritage Foundation, the goal is to post 100 names of government workers to a website this summer to show a potential new administration who might be standing in the way of a second-term Trump agenda—and ripe for scrutiny, reclassifications, reassignments or firings.
The effort, focused on top career government officials who aren’t appointees within the political structure, has stunned democracy experts and shocked the civil service community in what they compare with the red scare of McCarthyism. Jacqueline Simon, policy director at the American Federation of Government Employees, said the language being used—the Heritage Foundation’s announcement praised the group for ferreting out “anti-American bad actors”—is “shocking.” Civil servants are often ex-military personnel and are required to take an oath to the Constitution to work for the federal government, not a loyalty test to a president, she and others said. “It just seems as though their goal is to try to menace federal employees and sow fear,” said Simon, whose union backs President Joe Biden, a Democrat, for reelection.
This guy is a lifer in Republican politics, being a former Senate aide and all that. Authoritarian impulses have been pulsing within the conservative movement for forty years. This has produced a political class devoid of democratic conscience and, yes, honest patriotism. If that were not the case, they would not be nominating a half-mad crook for president for a third time.
He’s a former staffer to then-Sen. Jim DeMint, the South Carolina conservative Republican who later led Heritage and now helms the Conservative Policy Institute, where American Accountability Foundation has a mailing address. Jones also worked for Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, and provided opposition research for Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential bid. With six researchers, Jones’ team operates remotely across the country, poring over the information about federal workers within Homeland Security, the State Department and other agencies that deal with immigration and border issues. Their focus is on the highest ranks of the civil servants—GS-13, GS-14 and GS-15 employees and those in senior executive positions who could put up roadblocks to Trump’s plans for tighter borders and more deportations.
From 1829 until the end of the nineteenth century, most federal jobs changed hands every time the White House did. Starting with the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, civil-service reform was a volatile national issue, patronage having become an essential part of staffing the government. It subsequently split the Republican party. In 1883, the passage of the Pendleton Act created the United States Civil Service Commission, which was a great leap forward in professionalizing some of the national government. It was signed by former patronage prince Chester A. Arthur, who’d ascended to office after the murder of President James Garfield. Garfield’s killer, Charles Guiteau, was a frustrated office-seeker, which put a lot of momentum behind civil-service reform, more than Arthur was able to withstand.
There’s something charming about the simple monetary greed that drove the old spoils system. This other thing is a wholly different animal. It is a spoils system based on personal loyalty to a convicted felon, and to an idea of a disunited America made up of imaginary enemies.
Heritage President Kevin Roberts said the “weaponization of the federal government” has been possible only because of the “deep state of entrenched Leftist bureaucrats.” He said he was proud to support the work of American Accountability Foundation workers “in their fight to hold our government accountable and drain it of bad actors.”
You have to believe that codswallop, or pretend convincingly that you do, if you want to join the incoming Schutzstaffel.
[Jones] dismissed the risks that could be involved in publicly posting the names, salary information and other details of federal workers who have some level of privacy or the idea his group’s work could put employees’ livelihoods in jeopardy. “You don’t get to make policy and then say, ‘Hey, don’t scrutinize me,’ ” he said. He acknowledges some of the work is often a “gut check” or “instinct” about which federal employees would be suspected of trying to block a conservative agenda. “We’re looking at, ‘Are there wrong people on the bus right now that are, you know, openly hostile to efforts to secure the southern border?’ ” he said.
This isn’t something they might do. This is something they are already doing. Pat McCarran never had their arrogance. Joe McCarthy never had their financing. The new order is already at work.
