I’m under the weather today or I might attempt a more robust response to this:
House Republicans this week reinstated an arcane procedural rule that enables lawmakers to reach deep into the budget and slash the pay of an individual federal worker — down to a $1 — a move that threatens to upend the 130-year-old civil service.
The Holman Rule, named after an Indiana congressman who devised it in 1876, empowers any member of Congress to offer an amendment to an appropriations bill that targets a specific government employee or program.
These folks are always more evil than I can anticipate. I could spend a lot of time trying to imagine how they’ll seek to screw us and not come up with reviving a House rule from 1876 that allows congresspeople to legally write what are essentially Bills of Attainder to financially ruin civil servants they don’t like.
I’m not a lawyer and I don’t play one on the interwebs, but my reading of United States v. Lovett is that you cannot ordinarily, without due process or a trial, deny a federal worker their salary or single them out for punishment in some tangible way.
I thought we settled this after President Garfield was assassinated by a loon who thought he was owed a patronage job and President Arthur signed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883.
Turns out that this was just a temporary innovation on America’s part.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said that insofar as voters elected Trump with the hope of fundamentally changing the way government works, the Holman Rule gives Congress a chance to do just that.
“This is a big rule change inside there that allows people to get at places they hadn’t before,” he told reporters this week.
Asked which agencies would be targeted, he said that “all agencies should be held accountable and tested in a manner and this is an avenue to allow them to do it.”
There’s more to discuss but, as I said, I’m feeling a little ill today.
Just remember, they don’t want to take us back to Andy Griffith’s America; they want to send us back to the 19th Century.
Surely every law student dreads the following when it appears in required reading:
“Somewhat in detail”. Somewhat understated as well.
It takes 6 pages in the original volume.
No I don’t understand what the hell the case means.
But you have to love this from the sponsor of the House Bill:
Does this bit of insanity mean they can reduce each other’s pay to $1 as well? If so, proceed. It should be fun.
Very few Congresscritters, of either party, actually need their salary.
This is why all the ‘cut their pay and send them home’ shouting, from either party, is just noise.
Will that be a stand-alone special appropriations bill or tacked on to some other piece of legislation that has nothing to do with the budget? Otherwise, der Trumper will have to put it in his first budget proposal.
It’s a boondoggle or folly, but economically, a dollar cut in foreign military spending redirected to the stupid wall would be less harmful.
Hmmm — and just recently Trump wanted a list of all scientists working for the gov’t that had worked on climate change research. I can see where this new rule-change is heading. Quite sure their ratfuckery will not be limited to scientists.
Crossing the Rubicon. If the opposition were savvy enough to know how to use it.
“I thought we settled this…”
We should know by now that nothing is ever “settled” with regard to the American “conservative” movement. It’s a wonder they don’t suggest a return to slavery, a flourishing US social institution only a decade or so before the Holman Rule, after all, and well within the desired landscape of American society, ha-ha.
US v Lovett probably provides cold comfort to civil servants as there the blacklisted employees quit and filed claims (lawsuits) for back pay, claims which went to the Supreme Court. Not really a procedure that the ordinary NASA climate scientist, for example, can really depend upon to pay the monthly mortgage.
And with an upcoming Trump majority, I wouldn’t place too much reliance on (FDR New Deal) Court cases according individual schmoes some kind of procedural rights against the federal gub’mint—unless we’re talking rights to assault weapons, of course. Lovett is a “lib’rul!” decision and is likely a dead letter in 2017 and beyond. We don’t really “have” the rights we think we have; precedent is meaningless now.
As a movement and party filled with hatred for gub’mint, and growing ever more radical, a return to this 1876 rule is par for the course. It will chill any interest by intelligent, qualified and competent people to risk joining the civil service, certainly while the Congress is controlled by Repubs–which looks to be for quite a while indeed. Since elected Repubs hate being shown up by facts and data, getting rid of competent civil servants is only to be expected in the Age of Incompetence the incompetent white electorate has foisted upon us. Bullying and Hackery is the order of the day in TrumpAmerica. We are to become the Land of Incompetence.
It is also clear that the rule applies to federal “programs” as well, so funding for basically anything in a proposed budget, from the ACA to climate research, will now be subject to amendments by Gomer Gohmert and Steve King.
One interesting question is when had the Holman Rule (previously) been scrapped?
It’s like the latest iteration of Republicans plan to do wholesale what those in the age of Bush/Cheney did in a retail manner. How long before the thugs won’t be able to open the Capitol doors if they clear out all the Bunney Greenhouses that keep things working? Another historical reference is the US Attorneys Bush fired (they kept the thug Christie).
Is the public longing for the days of GWHB’s FEMA and GWB’s Brownie? Democratic elites might be rubbing their hands in glee anticipating the big splat to come from these jokers.
I read somewhere it was last used in 1983. By used I mean included in the rules, not necessarily been used in practice, and it was a husk of its former self.
OT. Notice on my phone says Trump will ask congress for money to pay for the wall. The good times keep coming.
No one in the Democratic side is searching arcane rules, court precedents, or laws that can be used to blindside the GOP juggernaut?
No one?
I find that political malpractice. Why didn’t they see this kind of maneuver coming? The GOP has been at total war for 22 years.
When do Democrats realize that we are far, far beyond the political norms that prevailed even in the Nixon era?
give the time. They’ll catch on in another couple of decades. It’s not as if Karl Rove didn’t let the cat out of the bag a decade ago with:
And part of their “own reality” is searching for any wiggle room in the Constitution, federal legislation, judicial rulings and operating and legal precedents. They’ve been doing that on abortion and voting rights for longer than 22 years.
they want to send us back to the 19th Century.
Absolutely. I have felt for a very long time that the true GOP “vision” for America is exactly this. A return to the original Gilded Age, where there were no worker rights, no worker security (hell who needs Social Security and medical coverage?); no environmental protection; easy and free corporate access to public lands; an unregulated and rapacious Wall Street; racial segregation and oppression; restrictive immigration laws against the “wrong people,” all topped off by a perverse form of Calvinist “Christianity” and Social Darwinism where, if you are an economic failure and poor, “God doesn’t love you.”