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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   38783 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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If you intentionally break the law by firing bureaucrats on partisan grounds

I would think that the plan would be to fire them based on lack of merit?

In his own words, "fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people", to "seize the institutions of the left" as a "de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program".

He's not saying to fire bad bureaucrats or incompetent DEI hires; he's saying to fire democrats.

He's not saying to fire democrats; he's saying 'fire bureaucrats who won't take direction from the executive'. 'Disobeys the boss' is grounds for firing literally everywhere.

This seems like a sane-wash. Vance did not say "fire bureaucrats who won't take direction from the executive". I agree that doing that would be proper (and presumably legal). He says "fire every single midlevel bureaucrat", which doesn't seem to suggest leaving in place those who do take direction.

The fact that Vance goes on to advocate defying court rulings against the move suggests heavily that he acknowledges his preferred path would be explicitly illegal and that he doesn't care.

This seems like a sane-wash. Vance did not say "fire bureaucrats who won't take direction from the executive". I agree that doing that would be proper (and presumably legal). He says "fire every single midlevel bureaucrat", which doesn't seem to suggest leaving in place those who do take direction.

That seems like kind of an in-sane wash to me -- do you really think Vance plans to fire tens of thousands of people?

(and replace them with other people -- to be clear there are probably quite a few mid-level bureaucratic positions that could be eliminated altogether a la Millei)

Why wouldn't I believe it? It's what he said explicitly. And he went on to further state what he thought the consequences of that move would be and how he would respond to those consequences.

If you think that's an insane plan, fair enough, but that's what he says in his own words that he wants to do.

Why wouldn't I believe it?

Because it would be kind of impractical to fire/hire literally every position upon taking office, and Vance does not appear to be mentally retarded?

This is exactly what sanewashing is though. "Well literally abolishing the police would obviously be retarded, so they obviously don't mean that." But yes, they really did literally want to abolish the police and they actually were retarded.

I don't know if Trump is going to go ahead with this full scale cleanout of the bureaucracy, but I know Vance isn't the only person on his side who wants this and is planning for it. Like the whole Project 2025 thing has gotten a lot of press couching it in vaguely conspiratorial terms as a secret policy agenda but the more substantial and meaningful part of the project IMO is the effort to build a database of loyalists pre-vetted to come and fill those positions.

The full video and (admittedly autogen'd) transcript is here, with the relevant quotes starting around 23:00 to 30:00 (probably not worth listening to). I'm not a big fan of the Andrew Jackson worship, but the question itself assumes that said bureaucrats will be defying executive direction.

Could you quote the part where he's saying that? I've read the article and what I'm seeing is only what popocatepetl quoted.

You are seeing "we want to fire Democrats" in the article? I'm not.

Assumption: when he says "our people", it means Republicans in 9 out of 10 cases.

So, when he talks about firing everyone, but replacing them with Republicans, it sure looks like Democrats as a class are being fired, while only individual Republicans are.

Assumption: when he says "our people", it means Republicans in 9 out of 10 cases.

So you're assuming he means that, and I'm assuming he means all the people who slow-walked Trump's initiatives last time -- do you really think that Vance will be going around checking party cards?

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