Congress sets fire to halt Donald Trump’s retaliation against the ‘Deep State’

In the final days of his presidency, Donald Trump quietly attempted what may be his most brazen game yet to remake the federal government in his own image: He issued an executive order giving him the power to fire essentially any civil servant at will.

This attempt was thwarted by the election of Joe Biden. But in the context of putting forward a presidential bid in 2024 and a return to the White House, Trump pledged to enact this order again immediately, I mentioned Axios.

Congress has the power to stop him — or any other president — from carrying out those plans. But it increasingly looks like they won’t use it.

The House of Representatives on Thursday passed legislation to legalize civil service protections, with six Republicans joining all Democrats in voting yes. But in the Senate, where 10 Republican senators will be required to vote for it, the legislation’s prospects are bleak.

For supporters of the bill, their window to change the dynamic is closing fast. If the House or Senate rolls into GOP control in the November elections — and at least one is likely — the chances of the bill being passed will drop dramatically.

This could pave the way for Trump, or any other like-minded president, to assert a level of control over influential political officials not seen in centuries.

“What you’re talking about is politicizing the civil service and getting rid of objective, impartial and nonpartisan government service…in favor of a workforce of two million people that is potentially more loyal to a politician than to the Constitution,” said Walter Schaub, a former director of the Federal Office of Government Ethics who is now a Senior Fellow. in the government oversight project.

Peoples said: This should frighten people.

It seems that a critical mass of people on Capitol Hill are not particularly afraid. Although House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was able to pass the legislation through the House, insiders note how low-key this push was.

This dynamic was most evident in the Senate, where the bill did not get a hearing on the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

While the Republicans in that room were more comfortable opposing Trump — and this bill is widely seen, fair or not, as a shot in the face for the former president — few are eager to embrace the federal workers’ cause, given the time – Management of bureaucratic conservative fists. None of the Republican senators are registered to support the legislation.

Meanwhile, no Democratic senators are likely to oppose the measure, but very few have sounded the alarm about threats to the civil service and increased pressure to move the legislation. Leadership aides say the prospect of the law being passed is bleak if Republicans do not support the measure, a reflection of the political realities of the legislation in an evenly divided room where most things pass gets 60 votes.

On the day the House passed the bill, Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) — the sponsor of the bill accompanying the Senate — expressed optimism to The Daily Beast that the House motion could be contagious, but stressed he had no update on the status of the bill. Bill.

“There’s a Senate culture that doesn’t really appreciate the threats to democracy right now,” Schaub said. He made it clear that Democrats feel no urgency that Biden is in charge and that Republicans “lack the imagination” to worry that another president, on either side, might follow a similar path to Trump.

The House bill’s sponsor, Representative Jerry Connolly (D-Va), said the issue should be nonpartisan because lawmakers in both parties should want to assert the power of the legislative branch – which is meant to be first among equals – to rein in any Executive Officer.

Connolly told The Daily Beast that while he does not intend the bill to be a reaction to a particular president, it is a reaction to Trump’s behavior.

“What he has shown, it seems, is that any president can do it,” Connolly said.

The impasse emerging on Capitol Hill over the legislation aligns with the legislature’s struggle, during and after Trump’s presidency, to assert its power to respond to the former president’s breaking of established norms.

For example, Trump allies have routinely tested whether the House of Representatives will use its constitutionally granted powers to hold accountable those who have ignored or defied Congressional subpoenas for information. Only since the Jan. 6 investigation, after Trump left office, have lawmakers really been willing to review that power by holding several of his aides in criminal contempt for Congress.

In the week the House passed the bill, lawmakers continued negotiations to change the long-standing process by which Congress certifies presidential elections — a process Trump sought to exploit on January 6 to stay in power.

As with these issues, the details of Trump’s designs on the federal workforce can seem dry and technical. But he and his allies easily talked about what they wanted to achieve through an executive order.

“We will pass critical reforms that make every employee in the executive branch severable by the President of the United States,” Trump said at a rally in March in South Carolina. “The deep state must be eliminated and it will be done.”

In October 2020, Trump signed an executive order that created a new classification category for federal employees called “Schedule F.” Scheduled employees will quickly lose their protections making it more difficult to fire them, making them work at will – that is, they can be fired at any time.

Trump’s intention, I mentioned Axioswas to convert up to 50,000 federal employees to Schedule F category. This represents only 2.5 percent of the federal workforce, but it can be an influential segment, including policy makers in professional agencies, regulatory enforcers, and decision makers in the federal government.

If granted the power, Trump can use Schedule F to fire important officials, from the White House to agencies like the Department of Justice, for whatever reason he chooses. I mentioned Axios That plan is central to Trump and his ruling allies’ plans should he run again in 2024 and win another term.

Connolly, author of the House Scale, summed up the thinking of many by calling this prospect a “nightmare.”

The legislation, titled Preventing the Welfare System Act of 2022, codifies existing employment protection measures and essentially forbids the reassignment of federal workers on existing schedules to any newly created schedule.

“This is a real issue and a real danger, if you are concerned about authoritarianism and anti-democratic behavior,” Connolly said.

In arguing against the bill, Trump allies in the House of Representatives relied on the typical minority argument — that Congress has better things to do — and tapped into longstanding GOP messages that Democrats disproportionately value federal bureaucrats.

The lead Republican on the Oversight Committee, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky), has coined Trump’s efforts as a well-intentioned campaign to improve “accountability” in the federal government by facilitating the firing of poor performers.

But Republicans’ most emphatic arguments against the bill seem to be saying the quiet part out loud. “President Trump has sought to confront this bureaucracy and return power to the people by draining the swamp,” Comer said. “We should all support policies that make it easier to isolate civil servants who refuse to follow the will of the electorate.”

Connolly responded on the House floor that Trump’s order “was never about firing poorly performing employees.”

Instead, he said, it was “designed to intimidate and isolate professional staff who have dared to provide impartial advice that may be viewed as inconsistent with the administration’s political agenda.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ge) was the first female GOP to speak out against the bill, coming out of the left by comparing the situation to the movie “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

“On the Black Pearl,” she said, “there are pirates on board who have become part of the ship’s walls.” (“It’s the second movie,” Greene helpfully pointed out, for those who were confused about which movie she meant in the Johnny Depp trilogy of period era.)

Greene said the bill in question would “make employees in the executive branch just a part of the wall of the building, making it impossible to get rid of them.”

In the end, six Republicans joined all Democrats to pass the measure, a group that includes many retired members and outspoken Trump critics.

These numbers don’t seem to herald a big spread in the Senate. The Daily Beast reached out to the offices of three Republican senators who might be more open to considering the action: Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), Mitt Romney (R-Utah), and Lisa Murkowski (R-Rn). .

Collins’ office referred The Daily Beast to a comment it previously made to the local press, in which it stated that the top priority of the federal workforce should be getting employees back into personal work in order to improve their services. The Maine senator did not specifically interfere with the bill, but said she would “carefully review any plan to reclassify the status of thousands of federal employees and oppose blatant efforts to politicize the civil service.”

Romney’s office declined to comment. Murkowski’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

With election season in full swing, Congress has only a few days left this year to legislate, its board full of spending bills to avert a government shutdown.

Lawmakers hope there is a way to pass civil service protections — perhaps by attaching it to a must-have bill — but most recognize that this could be a long battle.

As a potential GOP takeover of Congress, and Trump’s 2024 bid, looms over that effort, Connolly emphasized that the underlying issue is not ready to fade.

Democrats view Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a presidential candidate for 2024 or later, as someone who could embrace Trump’s civil service positions.

“I don’t think it’s a motive that will go away, and there are other authoritarian figures who are potentially more lethal than Trump,” Connolly said. “We have to fix this in law.”

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