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For complex historical reasons, Federal employees dont get much love.

Republicans already had begun their war on expertise nearly 90 years ago, when they condemned the New Deal for being run by distant bureaucrats. Joseph McCarthy made a career accusing those bureaucrats of being Soviet spies. George Wallace demagogued that they were pointy-headed intellectuals who couldnt park a bicycle straight.

This calumny has reached a peak with Trump. Federal employees are either denizens of the Swamp or agents of the Deep State conspiring with George Soros against Real Murrica. Republicans have now reached the point where they think they can demolish the federal government, fulfilling Grover Norquists dream of making it small enough to drown in the bathtub.

Yet somehow Republican officials also believe their voting base will continue to get their Social Security checks delivered, their Medicare claims processed, and their doublewides promptly repaired by FEMA after theyre knocked off their cinder blocks by a hurricane or tornado. Magically, it seems, the work will get done without anyone to do it.

An honest, dedicated, professional, and apolitical civil service is a necessary adjunct to competent and humane governance. What happens when its rejected is evidenced by the number of COVID deaths in the United States that might have been avoided if not for the Trump regimes sabotage of previous CDC guidance and denigration and the muzzling of government health experts.

History is a reliable guide to this contention. The German civil service of the 1920s, a hangover from Imperial Germany, was generally hostile to Weimar democracy. That's why it happily complied with Hitlers orders to fire Jewish employees and coordinate (gleichschalten) its policies with those of the Nazi Party. Administrators, statisticians, and employees of the state railway cheerfully scheduled the delivery of human cargoes to the death camps. They became willing desk murderers.

The French civil service, riven by culture wars since the Dreyfus Affair, on the whole submitted readily to the demands of the German occupation, rounding up Jews and dissidents. Its avatar might be Maurice Papon, a career police bureaucrat whose opportunistic infamy did not end with the deportation of Jews to their deaths, but extended to torture and massacre during the Algerian War of the fifties and sixties.

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The Danish civil service, by contrast, generally retained its human decency and upheld national solidarity with the citizens it served. A higher percentage of resident Jews survived the war than in any other country the Germans occupied, partly because the civil service, in collaboration with the Danish people, helped them escape to Sweden.

We can count on a near-certainty that Trump will attempt, both before and after the election, to maintain a death-grip on power by foul means. It may come as an effort to use federal law enforcement to interfere with election preparations, balloting, and vote-counting. We have seen indications of this already.

If a loss at the polls is plainly evident, he may try to sabotage the machinery of federal agencies, destroy or alter documents to hide evidence of criminality, or retaliate against persons in or out of government. He may even use compliant armed agencies like ICE (which lately seems to believe it works for Trump, rather than the country), or mercenary groups such as those run by Erik Prince to launch an insurrection as prelude to a declaration of martial law.

Accordingly, Joe Biden must make a major speech directly addressed to all federal employees, including the military and those employed by U.S. corporations like the Postal Service. It must make these points:

Therefore, Biden must there make the following clear in no uncertain terms: We know exactly what you in the Trump regime are capable of; we will not be caught by surprise or react timidly. Those who keep true faith with the Constitution and the laws of the United States have nothing to fear; those who abuse their authority will receive swift and certain removal, punishment, and disgrace.

And that includes you, Donald Trump. President Ford may have had other ideas about the criminal acts of his predecessor. I assure the American people my administration will uphold the words engraved on the Supreme Court building: equal justice under law.

Read the original here:
A Modest Proposal to Prevent Sabotage by the Trump Regime - Common Dreams