Conservatives Makin' A List Of Civil Servants, Checkin' It Twice, Gonna Fire Your Ass If You're On It

Gonna find out who's a commie rat, and who's nice

Imagine it is 1950. Sen. Joe McCarthy has just given a speech to the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, where he waved around a piece of paper and hollered that it contained a list of 205 communists working in the State Department.

Now imagine that the internet existed in 1950. Imagine that the moment McCarthy gave this speech, the lackeys in his office published the list of names on a website for the entire public to read and freak out over. Links to the site got blasted out over email and on social media. Right-wing outlets ran with it. William F. Buckley started posting installments of McCarthy and His Enemies as a Substack instead of the tedious slog of taking years to write and publish the entire book. Richard Nixon made imprisoning all those communists a central part of his Senate campaign. Every person on that list suddenly needed a round-the-clock security detail.

Now imagine it is 2024, and this scenario really is happening. At least it will if a group of Republican nutters backed by the Heritage Foundation get their way:

Tom Jones and his American Accountability Foundation are digging into the backgrounds, social media posts and commentary of key high-ranking government employees, starting with the Department of Homeland Security. […]

[T]he goal is to post 100 names of government workers to a website this summer to show a potential new administration who might be standing in the way of a second-term Trump agenda — and ripe for scrutiny, reclassifications, reassignments or firings.

Jones is a political operative who worked on Capitol Hill for Jim DeMint and Ted Cruz. He also served as the legislative director for Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a job whose duties probably mostly consisted of explaining to the senator that congressional bills are not sentient creatures capable of song, no matter what he might have seen on ”Schoolhouse Rock.”

"We need to understand who these people are and what they do,” said Jones.

Of course one could accomplish this without putting these people’s names on the Internet, where Trump’s legions of syphilitic howler monkeys can find it and inundate them with death threats, but we’re betting Jones thinks of that possibility as a feature and not a bug.

He acknowledges some of the work is often a “gut check” or “instinct” about which federal employees would be suspected of trying to block a conservative agenda.

Ah, well. Our gut tells us Tom Jones is actually a giant cockroach in a human skin-suit. And now that’s out on the Internet. Uh-oh.

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How is this group of knuckle-draggers finding these names of random bureaucrats they want to toss to the wolves? They are relying on tips from a network of “conservative contacts, including workers.” So: mad at your officemate Jim for warming his Filet-O-Fish in the office microwave? Mad at your ex-wife, who thinks undocumented immigrants should be treated humanely and also happens to be a level GS-13 employee with the Border Patrol? Tell Tom Jones and ruin their summers, and possibly their lives!

This project, which has a $100,000 grant from the Heritage Foundation, is part of the wider push by Trump lackeys to weaken civil service protections and reclassify thousands of non-political employees across the government who can then be fired if they do not swear fealty to the orange ape and his agenda.

Or, as Heritage president and human thumb Kevin Roberts put it:

“[W]eaponization of the federal government” has been possible only because of the “deep state of entrenched Leftist bureaucrats.” He said he was proud to support the work of American Accountability Foundation workers “in their fight to hold our government accountable and drain it of bad actors.”

By “bad actors,” he means government employees who have sworn an oath to the Constitution, not to the president. Unfortunately, Trump and his cultists don’t see a difference.

We’re old enough to remember when a Republican administration reclassified political appointments as civil servants so those employees could stay on in their jobs during a Democratic administration and hamstring its policy goals. Now the wingnuts want to do the exact opposite.

Trump already tried this reclassification scheme once with Schedule F, a rule he put in place towards the end of his administration in 2020. The Biden administration reversed it practically the moment it took office. Reviving Schedule F is one of the goals of Project 2025, the Heritage-supported blueprint for fucking over American democracy that a new Trump administration will put in place if Tangerine Tito gets restored to office next year.

Somewhere Joe McCarthy is smiling, and only partly because he’s drunk.

[AP / Raw Story]

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