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Notes -
He can pretty easily fire them in that case.
You're very strangely continuing to prod many folks to go all the way toward declaring some form of civil war in some limit, but that's silly and it won't get there. It's the same type of hysteria that led the Blues to imagining scenarios about, "WHAT IF TRUMP JUST IGNORES THE SUPREME COURT AND JUST DEPORTS THE MUSLIMS AND EXECUTES TEH GAYS AND REFUSES TO LEAVE OFFICE AND AND AND AND".... uh, and then we had a reasonably normal presidency with some low-level variance.
Trump fired people before. They went home. Sure, they also went on TV and were lauded with social approval for hating Trump on TV, but they went home from their government job and someone else took their government job. Like, what do you think happens right now if someone just refuses to go home from government property after they get fired from their government job?
Eventually, security evicts them (and the police probably arrest for trespassing), while their former coworkers do nothing to stop it.
But the point is that security won't do this, nor their coworkers. When security keeps letting them in because "they still work here," their coworkers keep cooperating because "they still work here," and payroll keeps paying them because "they still work here," how do they not still work there?
The #Resisters suffer from a coordination game. This is especially difficult, because the firings will likely be one-by-one and entirely focused on the upper/mid-upper level of the bureaucracy. People whose names you don't know. "The most heavily Democratic departments are the EPA, Department of Education, and the State Department, where about 70% of employees are registered to the party." So, Trump sees that, say, the EPA is #Resisting in implementing the EO and slow-walking the naming of new Schedule F positions. EPA has 15 upper management presidential appointees with Senate confirmation. I can't easily find a simple number, but they have a bunch more that are just straight political appointees without Senate confirmation. No one has even remotely suggested #Resistance on the level of, "When Trump fires the old political appointees at this level and appoints new ones, we're going to #Resist, lock the new guys out of the building, and physically fight against security to keep the other guys coming in. Oh, plus, BTW, we need to infiltrate whatever organization manages their pay system to keep the paychecks going (even though that's likely housed in some other agency that just does it for a variety of them)."
So, what does Trump do? First, he goes to his 15 Senate-confirmed appointees and says, "Yo dawgs, you need to file your TPS reports or I'm going to fire you." Do those Senate-confirmed appointees file their TPS reports? If so, problem solved. If not, he starts firing them. Maybe one of the nine sections controlled by an Assistant Administrator is the only one who doesn't file their TPS report. Trump fires him/her or asks him/her if the problem is another political appointee within their section. Fires whoever the problem is. Each of these people almost certainly can carry out the duty of listing the new Schedule F slots pretty much on their own, if they have to.
But okay, you say, the #Resistance will come when Trump fires the Assistant Administrator for Environmental Information. Everybody in the Environmental Information department is up in a tizzy and is using every tool in their toolbox to prevent the Assistant Administrator from filing his/her TPS report. Two things to note. First, the Assistant Administrator for Environmental Information is already a bloody Trump appointee! It was already someone that Trump picked to do that job! How many #Resisters are going to fight security to protect a Trump appointee?! This is a position that has been a political appointment for essentially forever; this is a position where no one across the upper management of the entire civil service would claim can not be simply fired and replaced by a new appointee. Second, #Resisters in other agencies or outside government have no bloody clue who this person is. They have a horrid coordination game to play. They have to somehow coordinate enough people inside and outside the agency to all simultaneously put their necks out in open defiance of the way things have always been done, they way that they're claiming to argue is the way it should still be done, but that they're all going to simultaneously literally be willing to fight security to keep one nameless Trump appointee over some other nameless Trump appointee. Gimme a freaking break. Ain't no chance. You'll see some ridiculous article in the Times about "trouble in the EPA", as Trump is "endangering the future of the climate" by futzing with some no-name at the EPA, but there is zero chance that you're going to coordinate that many people to physically #Resist to protect one upper/mid-level Trump appointee that everyone acknowledges he can just fire and replace.
If they don't do that, problem solved. We have a new Assistant Administrator for Environmental Information, and that new guy files his friggin' TPS report. If they do it, he can just bring in security from one of the other agencies, take his pick from the most loyal, and either the current security guys (probably literally nobodies who were hired on contract from the private sector at the "lowest cost", drawn from a very different portion of the population than EPA upper/middle management) will physically fight them to prevent them from taking over security for the building or, again, problem solved.
The only reason why there was ever the chance of having as much hullabaloo as the FBI director had was because (a) for better or worse, everyone knew who Jim Comey was, so they could reasonably coordinate around an individual they trusted, (b) they had at least a fig leaf of the idea of independence in the position from the statute, and (c) they had the rhetoric of an independent investigation into Trump, himself. They won't have any of that here. They would have to simultaneously show up to violate the law, risking prison for themselves, in a huge coordination game, to protect some nobody upper/mid-level Trump appointee. Ain't no bloody chance. The TPS report will get filed, even if the head Administrator (also hand-picked by Trump) just has to write the names of positions on the damn TPS report himself. If anything, it gives the top Trump appointee the chance to target anyone in the organization who gives him even a whiff of #Resistance. Then, when that lower-level guy gets fired and replaced by a new Schedule F guy, the #Resisters will have to play an even worse coordination game for an even lower-level nobody, all putting their own cushy jobs (and possibly their freedom) on the line.
Why would they need to? Security will be the ones helping them "lock the new guys out of the building" and "keep[ing] the other guys coming in."
No they won't, because, in a sense, they already have. Even if it's "some other agency," it's still fully-captured, still staffed by the same sort of people, in full agreement. The managers of their pay system will side with them automatically. It's all one big, totally-captured Permanent Bureaucracy, the "separate parts" in lock-step with one another.
How does that solve the problem?
Again, how do they enforce this duty?
So Trump fires a political appointee whose nominal subordinates refuse to obey, and replaces them. What prevents the agency from continuing to #Resist the new Trump appointee?
Who are just as captured and will side with them against a Republican president. The whole point is that nobody is going to obey. Every group with the power to enforce any firings outside the direct appointment level is already part of the #Resistance, and are going to side with their fellow Defenders of Our Democracy against Cheeto Hitler's ordering them to help make him Führer.
How so? Who's going to arrest them?
Let's start here. Trump needs to replace the security at the EPA, because even though they're literal nobodies who were hired on contract from the private sector on a "lowest cost" basis and don't come from anything like the same political milieu as deep state EPA, for some reason, I guess due to having interacted with deep state EPA for long enough on the job, they're riled up into a frenzy and are just refusing to obey orders.
Trump goes to ICE and says, "Some fucking lefties at EPA who want to take your big ass trucks from you need to be taught a lesson, and I'm giving you the authority to take over security at EPA." Do you think that some rednecks from ICE will "obey"? Do you think that the current lowest cost contract security at the EPA will physically fight them?
Obey Trump? No. Because while the rank and file might be "rednecks," they're going to do what their immediate supervisor back in the office tells them, and that guy's another Lefty permanent bureaucrat.
I wish I remember where it was, but I recall about a year or so ago, reading a bit on a "2nd Amendment" forum, where the usual narrative on "door-to-door confiscation" — that "they" can't get the people needed to do it because the cops are 1. on our side and/or 2. too afraid of getting shot, and thus won't do it even if ordered — was raised, and a Chicago cop chimed in to disagree. If "his boss" tells him to go door-to-door taking people's guns? He'll do it, no matter his personal opinion on the 2nd Amendment, because he has kids, and a mortgage, and his pension to think about, and what would happen to you at your work if you told your immediate supervisor that you weren't going to obey an explicit order from him? And besides, the people he'd be confiscating the guns from skew old and law-abiding, and he's patrolled some of Chicago's worst neighborhoods, so he'd rather be doing the door-to-door confiscation over returning to the latter, because he's probably less likely to be shot.
The rank and file guy is going to put concern for his [Gollum voice]precious pension[/Gollum voice] over abstract political principles and a distant (and questionable) authority. "The mountains are high, and the Emperor is far away." Your immediate superior has a lot more power over your job and your pension than a distant, embattled, GOP president. In this scenario, they might as well be meat robots.
And the supervisor at ICE will point out that he has no authority to arrest the EPA guys even if they were doing something wrong — which he doesn't think they are — and so he's not going to issue illegal orders to obstruct Federal employees in performance of their duties, in response to illegal orders from a would-be dictator.
So no, I don't think "current lowest cost contract security at the EPA" will physically fight them, or anyone else, because nobody will be coming.
It doesn't matter who Trump (or DeSantis, or any other Republican president) orders to enforce his attempts to remove the disobedient bureaucracy — FBI, ICE, or anyone else, none of them will obey. Not one. The "separate agencies" are all one big, singular machine, in lockstep, and not one part of it will turn against the rest on orders of a Republican.
You don't think Trump could find one Republican ICE supervisor willing to march on the EPA? One?
It seems like your big mental hurdle is this dogmatic assertion that a Republican president couldn't find even one DC cop to escort an uncooperative bureaucrat out of the office. It's true, if all federal employees are under a magickal gaesa which prevents them from percieving the President, his influence will be limited. But if (as I suspect is more true) the President could convince some dudes with guns from the most red agency he can find that Uncooperative Agency X are disobeying legitimate orders, then somebody is "coming", and now the near-minimum wage contractor mall cops at EPA headquarters have to decide whether they believe in the Invisible Dictatorship of the Experts enough to die for it, or if it might just be better to go home because men with bulletproof vests are shouting at them very angrily.
Well, suppose he does find a few. Then those few guys get outnumbered and outgunned by the FBI, who arrest them for the Federal crime of interfering with a Federal official — the aforementioned uncooperative bureaucrat — in the course of his duties. Because that's what it's called when you try to forcibly drag a non-fired Federal employee out of what is still his place of work.
The FBI? Who work for the president? Whose director is appointed by the president? Who's going to order them to do that?
This gets into the coordination problem again - even if every bureaucrat to a man was a diehard technocrat, if all the bigwigs who give orders according to their technocratic rules are not organizing resistance to the President because those same bigwigs are appointed by him, there's no one with the authority to actually kick off the great #Resistance Coup, even if they'd like to.
Even if they're all fanatics, Joe TrustTheScience, non-ranking FBI agent, can't just declare "I am now the Anti-President, all Experts rally to me!" and then the two million other fanatics who have never heard of him swear feudal homage to him on the spot.
Compare how the Soviet coup attempt in 1991 fell apart. The new junta tried to establish themselves as the new authority on the strength of their communist bona fides, but because communism was all about Party Discipline and Obeying the Great Comrade, military units in Leningrad didn't listen to them because nowhere in the Communist Party Bylaws does it say a coalition of losers and has-beens can become the new dictatorship if they feel like it.
To put it another way, maybe the two million experts can all agree they hate [Republican President], but I doubt they'd all agree on who should be [Unelected Democrat President].
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The supervisor at ICE is also a redneck with a big ass truck.
Frankly, dude, you're delusional. This is a clear hallmark of someone who has lost touch with reality. This is precisely analogous to how everyone on the left worked themselves up into an insane tizzy when Trump became president the first time. "What if he just does this?! What if he just does that?! What if he ignores the supreme court and and and and just orders a nuclear strike because he's grumpy?!" Your delusions about literally millions of people across thousands of agencies being one singular machine in lockstep are exactly on this level of crazy. I'm thinking that you don't need to reason through things on an internet forum; you need meds... or a primetime show on MSNBC.
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