To Save America, Abolish the Civil Service

Over the past few months, we've been considering the wholly negative history of the so-called "Progressive"-era constitutional amendments, none of which did anything to improve the nation but did much to undermine its founding principles. Until the end of the Civil War, the constitution had only been amended twice since the passage of the Bill of Rights in 1791: the obscure, jurisdictional 11th Amendment, (1795), which had to do with lawsuits involving state and federal courts, and the 12th, (1804), which partially clarified the procedures for presidential elections. Then, between 1865 and 1870, came the three Reconstruction amendments, abolishing slavery (except as a punishment for a crime, such as a prison chain gang) and giving African-Americans citizenship and voting and other rights.

And then after a 43-year break, came the Progressive Era and its assault on Americans' money and personal freedom, the radical changes in how the Senate is selected, Prohibition of a formerly legal substance, and finally the extension of the franchise to women, in defiance of all historical norms going back to the ancient Greeks, on the theory that it wasn't "fair." All have been proven disasters.

It's not just the constitutional amendments that have contributed to the decline of the Republic, however: it's also the actions of an ever-burgeoning federal government, which has simultaneously abandoned its core fiscal, executive, judicial, and legislative responsibilities, and extended its intrusive reach into almost every facet of our existence via the creation of the regulatory agencies, which now essentially control every aspect of a citizen's public and private life.

Created by Congress, often at the urging of the president, these independent, immortal bureaucratic golems are a second form of government that co-exist with the constitutional system most Americans think we have. Being "independent," they are at once legislative in function but also judicial in essence: their wishes have the force of law (often written by themselves), tried before administrative law judges, and enforced at gunpoint by their private police forces when necessary. They are effectively beyond the direct supervision of all three legitimate branches of government, to the extent that they now form a fourth branch of government.

Who's in charge here?

Like most things involving the feds, they are largely staffed by members of the Civil Service -- nearly three million employees and counting. Many, if not most, belong to one of some one hundred civil-service unions, through which they bargain with the IRS-funded government regarding their wages and working conditions; you, the taxpayer, have no say in the matter. So it's no surprise that over the past hundred years, jobs in the "public" sector now pay better and have greater benefits, including more time off and greater job security, than do jobs in the private sector. So what if it's become the employer of last resort for a significant portion of the population? They vote, en masse, for the folks who pay them.

Like much of the legislation of the "Progressive" era, civil-service "reform" began as a Republican idea. Until 1871, the "spoils system"—instituted by Thomas Jefferson and expanded by Andrew Jackson— had obtained. Incoming administrations staffed their own departments, generally along party lines; patronage jobs were rewards for having supported Candidate X. The old bums were thrown out and the new bums rushed in.

That couldn't stand, of course, and so the United States Civil Service Commission was formed during the administration of Ulysses S. Grant in order to select government employees on the basis of merit instead of connections. It lasted two years, until its funding ran out. Succeeding Republican presidents, Rutherford B. Hayes and James A. Garfield, agitated for its restoration, but Garfield's assassination by a lunatic patronage seeker in 1881 after just a few months in office, halted the notion. However, in 1883, Garfield's vice president (and now president) Chester A. Arthur signed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act into law, and there was no stopping it after that.

At first the Democrats hated the idea. As the Tammany Hall fixer, George Washington Plunkitt, wrote:

This civil service law is the biggest fraud of the age. It is the curse of the nation. There can’t be no real patriotism while it lasts. How are you goin’ to interest our young men in their country if you have no offices to give them when they work for their party? Just look at things in this city today. There are ten thousand good offices, but we can’t get at more than a few hundred of them. How are we goin’ to provide for the thousands of men who worked for the Tammany ticket? It can’t be done. These men were full of patriotism a short time ago. They expected to be servin’ their city, but when we tell them that we can’t place them, do you think their patriotism is goin’ to last? Not much.

They say: “What’s the use of workin’ for your country anyhow? There’s nothin’ in the game.” And what can they do? I don’t know, but I’ll tell you what I do know.I know more than one young man in past years who worked for the ticket and was just overflowin’ with patriotism, but when he was knocked out by the civil service humbug he got to hate his country and became an Anarchist.

This ain’t no exaggeration. I have good reason for sayin’ that most of the Anarchists in this city today are men who ran up against civil service examinations. Isn’t it enough to make a man sour on his country when he wants to serve it and won’t be allowed unless he answers a lot of fool questions about the number of cubic inches of water in the Atlantic and the quality of sand in the Sahara desert?

When the people elected Tammany, they knew just what they were doin’. We didn’t put up any false pretenses. We didn’t go in for humbug civil service and all that rot. We stood as we have always stood, for rewardin’ the men that won the victory. They call that the spoils system. All right; Tammany is for the spoils system, and when we go in we fire every anti-Tammany man form office that can be fired under the law.

When bad guys get what's coming to them.

Today they love it. Civil Service and unionized public employees offer the donkeys a far, far wider field for graft and corruption than the spoils system ever did. A permanent bureaucracy enjoying the perks of "public service" in perpetuity that consistently votes for the Democrats? What's not to like?

But who's to say Plunkitt was wrong? The metastasized growth of government and an unfirable Civil Service work force have functioned in symbiosis for nearly a century and a half, with the result being the toxic kluge in Washington that has permanently altered the balance of power between Citizen and State. With everything subject to "regulation" at the whim of an unelected drone who can call down the wrath of the administrative state upon your head with the touch of a button, what chance does even an honest man have against this "work force"? Which is, in any case, lots of force and damn little work other than shakedown artistry.

It brings to mind the bill of particulars against King George III in the Declaration of Independence, particularly this one: “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.” The colonists, having not approved the imposition of new military courts and customs officers via their legislatures, rose up in arms against this and the other counts of the indictment that justified the overthrow of the Crown in the colonies.

Today's Americans, however, are made of decidedly lesser stuff. As the Covid Hoax and the nearly unopposed fascist lockdowns imposed by governments around the world without a shred of evidence that "Covid-19" posed any extraordinary existential threat have recently demonstrated, our citizens no longer have the gumption to say no to government, having bought into the Marxist notion that government is in and of itself the highest form of human endeavor as well as the final authority, and that nothing must go unobserved or unregulated by the Panopticon.

What was so bad about the spoils system? Had Donald Trump and some even halfway decent advisors—not Javanka—had free reign in the early days of his administration, the Swamp would have been drained overnight and, en passant, the election of 2020 might have been won. Was the spoils system perfect? Of course not. But the perfect can never be the enemy of the good, and sometimes the arc of "progressivism" needs to be reversed—by any means necessary, as our friends on the Left like to say—pounded into scrap metal and buried on the ash heap of history. This is such a time.

THE COLUMN: The System Is the Steal

The nastiest side effect of China's gift to the world, Covid-19, was not the illness itself, nor the deaths (surely over-attributed) it caused primarily among the aged and infirm. Nor was it the unnecessary and unconstitutional lockdowns that accompanied the government-fueled, manufactured authoritarian panic, along with the arbitrary abrogation of fundamental constitutional rights, including those protected under the first amendment: freedom of speech, assembly, and the free exercise of religion—a national disgrace that will live in infamy, and which should never be forgiven.

Nor was it the incalculable economic destruction caused by this unholy concoction of Chinese bat-butt soup, liver of pangolin, and gain-of-function seasonings provided by Chef Boyarfauci, nor the loss of several years of schooling for America's increasingly ineducable youth. Nor even was it the semi-mandatory "vaccines" that don't fulfill any of the traditional metrics for real vaccines, including prevention of disease and its transmission or the granting of future immunity; now the argument has moved to whether they actually kill people, which isn't an encouraging trajectory for something billed as a panacea.

No, the worst damage has been to our political-electoral systems, as the results of the past two elections have made abundantly clear. Forget the nonsense about a "stolen" election; all elections are "stolen," if by stolen you mean that one side won and one side lost, and have been since George Washington Plunkitt was a pup. (For those keeping score at home, Tammany Hall, of which Plunkitt was an outstanding exemplar, was founded by Aaron Burr, the first Democrat Party vice president, national traitor, and murderer of Alexander Hamilton.) Whatever the election rules are—and under our unwieldy system, there are 50 different sets of them—the party that manipulates them best usually wins. And this of course gives the long-practiced Democrats an enormous advantage.

The fundamental principle of all American elections has been to determine as far in advance as possible how many votes the other guy is getting and then come crashing in at the end with overwhelming numbers of newfound votes to close the deal at the finishing bell. You can find them in storerooms, in the trunks of cars; sometimes they fall off trucks, mimeographed and marked in advance to save the poor voter's time. You do whatever it takes, more or less within the limits of the law, and then worry about penalties after the election is safely in the bag.

Permission vs. forgiveness: the fraud, dear Brutus, lies not in the machines but in our electoral system. There is only one way to ensure a free and fair election. But before we get to that, consider this:

Democratic norms are not perfectly realized anywhere, even in advanced democracies. Access to the electoral arena always has a cost and is never perfectly equal; the scopes and jurisdictions of elective offices are everywhere limited; electoral institutions invariably discriminate against somebody inside or outside the party system; and democratic politics is never quite sovereign but always subject to societal as well as constitutional constraints... There is much room for nuance and ambivalence... [and] bending and circumventing the rules may sometimes be considered “part of the game.”

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Part of the game? It is the game. There is no perfect "democracy." The system is, in fact, the steal.

One of the Democrats' favored weapons a century ago was the Repeater, the man who voted in multiple districts under various names, a la today's college students, illegal aliens, single cat ladies with toxoplasmosis, and forgetful suburban wine moms. When the opposition (here called the Fusionists) tried to do the same thing, they would easily be caught out; one thing the GOP never has been any good at is being a criminal organization masquerading as a political party. It just doesn't have the talent for it:

The Fusionists make about the same sort of a mistake that a repeater made at an election in Albany several years ago. He was hired to go to the polls early in a half-dozen election districts and vote on other men's names before these men reached the polls. At one place, when he was asked his name by the poll clerk, he had the nerve to answer "William Croswell Doane."

"Come off. You ain't Bishop Doane," said the poll clerk.

"The hell I ain't, you—I" yelled the repeater.

Now, that is the sort of bad judgment the Fusionists are guilty of. They don't pick men to suit the work they have to do.

And what is that work? Why, winning elections, of course. Power and the lust for it is the only constant in political systems, even democracies. The Greeks were just as mad for dominance as any Roman consul; Periclean Athens was no idyll. Further, there is little or no proof that "democracies" are inherently superior to other forms of government, Churchill's silly formulation to the contrary notwithstanding. European democracies differ greatly from the American version, as do the Chinese and North Korean versions.

Nor is there any compelling practical argument in favor of universal suffrage; slaves, women, and male teenagers were not allowed to vote either in Greece or Rome, nor would they be for almost 2,000 years. Voting was generally limited to property owners, those with a financial stake in their society. As we'll see next week in my column about the history and effects of the 19th amendment, the expansion of a fetishized franchise ("sacred right," etc.) created at least as many problems as it solved. To the question of universal suffrage, "because" cannot be a satisfactory answer.

But unless the vote is given to toddlers, numerate chickens, or articulate dolphins, there are no more worlds left to conquer on the universal suffrage score. Covid, however, gave the Left whole new worlds to conquer: instead of expanding the franchise they simply expanded the time available to exercise it. Originally sold (as usual) as a "compassionate" and "fair" redress for the poor, the sick, the out-of-town, and those unable to read a calendar, mail-in and other forms of passive voting have now taken over the system:

The biggest issue for election administration in 2020 was the pivot to voting by mail throughout the country in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying importance of de-densifying in-person voting. This need led many states to increase opportunities for voting by mail, ranging from expanding the accepted reasons voters could list for requesting a mail ballot, to mailing ballots to all registered voters. As a consequence of these changes, the rate of voting by mail in 2020 doubled from 2016.

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That's not the worst of it. Friendly judges across the land threw out challenges to mail-in/absentee ballots on the niggling grounds that they weren't properly executed; worse, "ballot harvesting" allowed dumps of completely untraceable "votes" into random drop boxes, and lax counting regulations (differing from state to state) meant the suspect ballots could be quickly mingled into the legitimate-vote population. Add to that the arbitrary decision regarding the latest moment that ballots could be accepted even after the real polls had closed and you have a recipe for a perfectly legal steal.

Voting for fraud, not for democracy.

So while you’re complaining about the results of the last two elections, remember that in many states votes were cast weeks or even months ago. Those votes heavily favored the Democrats, which in part accounts for the election of a bona fide rutabaga as the new senator from Pennsylvania. Further, as long as one side can mail in—or worse, "discover"—an unlimited number of ballots or votes on thumb drives of uncertain provenance, with little or no chain of custody, and the other side appears in person with ID to vote once on election day (as Republicans tend to do), the former is always going to beat the latter. No cheating necessary! The Steal is built into the system.

The only chance we have of recapturing our Republic is to return to real voting: one day, one man, one vote, in person, with identification, on a paper ballot, and getting a purple finger in return to prevent Repeaters. No early voting, no late voting, no drop boxes, no "curated" votes, no harvested votes, no absentee ballots for any reason other than active-duty military overseas. If you're sick and can't get to the polls, tough. If you've moved out of the country, tough. Anything else is not an election, but a rolling plebiscite whose parameters can be adjusted on a whim and which therefore renders elections functionally meaningless. And if you don't think so, ask yourself why, with control of the House of Representatives currently on knife edge, votes are still being counted in Democrat-friendly California.

Citizenship ought to entail at least as many responsibilities as it does benefits. There's no right to vote in the Constitution: it has to be earned, not demanded. It's not for everybody (nor does everybody even want it): it shouldn't be for wards of the government, the criminal, the insane. Nothing encourage indigency like being able to vote yourself a raise with other people's money.

If the franchise is really "sacred," let's start acting like it. The country would be a better place, the government would be more honest, and we'd no longer have to endure now-constant accusations of fraud from both sides. Who wouldn't vote for that?

THE COLUMN: Guns N' Roeses

It has long been a dictum of mine that, as far as the progressive Left is concerned, "they never stop, they never sleep, they never quit." After their twin defeats at the Supreme Court last week, regarding two of their most sensitive issues (both of which derive from their devotion to cultural suicide, which is their principal objective), don't expect them to give up easily. They subscribe to their version of Islamism or the Brezhnev Doctrine: once they've conquered moral or physical territory, it can never go back to the way it was. They see themselves as the heroes of their own movies, good red-diaper babies constantly battling the forces of revanchism and irrendentism, which are you. The idea that they're the bad guy never occurs to them:

These are, after all, the same people who refused to accept George W. Bush's narrow presidential victory in 2000 ("selected, not elected"); refused to accept Bush's win over John Kerry in 2004; rained hellfire and brimstone down on poor Sarah Palin, whose only crime was a surfeit of motherhood, and snarlingly turned on her running mate and their erstwhile favorite maverick, John McCain in 2008; and went bonkers over the surprise victory of Donald Trump in 2016, thus triggering the entire "Russian collusion" hoax that started with Hillary Clinton and eventually came to embrace the FBI, the intelligence community, the media, and the judicial system.

In the same way, having outlawed school prayer and, from that beachhead, having driven almost any expression of the Christian faith from the public square—the offending prayer in question read, “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country," which the pestiferous Madalyn Murray O'Hair and her ilk somehow equated with the "establishment" of a religion—they have gone to the mattresses to expunge anything that smacks of Christianity, especially any proscriptions against the form of baby murder that goes by the sobriquets of "choice" and "women's health." To wit: abortion.

About their only admirable trait is their refusal to give up—something that brands them in perpetuity as sore losers, with whom we have to live as long as these United States stay together. The question is, how much longer can this go on?

"The State’s licensing regime violates the Constitution."

They won't realize it, of course, but justice Clarence Thomas, in the Bruen decision, and Samuel Alito, in Dobbs/Roe, just did them a big favor. In Bruen, Thomas and the majority invalidated New York State's Sullivan Law, a gangland-era judicial excrescence that for more than a century has been a clear violation of the Second Amendment. As I wrote in the New York Post ten years ago:

The father of New York gun control was Democratic city pol “Big Tim" Sullivan — a state senator and Tammany Hall crook, a criminal overseer of the gangs of New York. In 1911 — in the wake of a notorious Gramercy Park blueblood murder-suicide — Sullivan sponsored the Sullivan Act, which mandated police-issued licenses for handguns and made it a felony to carry an unlicensed concealed weapon.

This was the heyday of the pre-Prohibition gangs, roving bands of violent toughs who terrorized ethnic neighborhoods and often fought pitched battles with police. In 1903, the Battle of Rivington Street pitted a Jewish gang, the Eastmans, against the Italian Five Pointers. When the cops showed up, the two underworld armies joined forces and blasted away, resulting in three deaths and scores of injuries. The public was clamoring for action against the gangs.

Problem was the gangs worked for Tammany. The Democratic machine used them as shtarkers (sluggers), enforcing discipline at the polls and intimidating the opposition. Gang leaders like Monk Eastman were even employed as informal “sheriffs,” keeping their turf under Tammany control. The Tammany Tiger needed to rein in the gangs without completely crippling them. Enter Big Tim with the perfect solution: Ostensibly disarm the gangs — and ordinary citizens, too — while still keeping them on the streets.

As befits the criminal organization masquerading as a political party, that's exactly what the Democrats did. And what Justice Thomas just undid: "“Because the State of New York issues public-carry licenses only when an applicant demonstrates a special need for self-defense, we conclude that the State’s licensing regime violates the Constitution." You can read the opinion for yourself, and you should:

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The two most important words in Thomas's opinion are "self defense," an unalienable right from time immemorial. "Self defense" is also a concept that the Left has worked tirelessly to abolish, not simply via the Sullivan Law but with the countless thousands of "common sense" infringements they and their baleful cadres of lawyers have diligently inserted into state and municipal gun laws all across the country. Like Big Tim Sullivan, they know that when guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns, and that's just fine with them: the outlaws are doing their dirty work for them. Every shooting on the streets of Chicago, every mass murder by incel 18-year-olds who should never have been allowed near a firearm, brings them closer to their desired fascist/national-socialist state, one in which the government need not control the means of production but instead controls the only thing that matters: you and your fellow Americans. For the common good, of course.

But "self defense" smacks too much of freedom, and for the Left the only freedom they believe in is sexual license, untrammeled by any social, political, physical, or legal consequences. Such as special exotic diseases or, worse, children. Reproduction by proselytization is their preferred method of replication, the old-fashioned way being too cisnormative or heterogenerative or whatever their term of opprobrium du jour is at the moment. Their howls of outrage at Justice Alito's Dobbs decision come from a very deep and ugly place: as with Bruen their preferred outcomes are diktats from a central authority, and not the messy result of constitutional republican democracy, in which all matters not expressly delegated to the central government are reserved for the states and the people.

A crime, never a "right."

Ah, but to superannuated "feminists" such as Gloria Steinem, "democracy"=abortion. “Obviously,” she wrote, “without the right of women and men to make decisions about our own bodies, there is no democracy.” Never mind that the deliberate killing of a quickened child within a woman's womb was not only never considered a "fundamental right" as the wizened poltroon pretending to be president said the other day; unless you were an ancient Baal-worshipping or Moloch-adjacent Canaanite or Carthaginian, it was a crime. As Alito noted in his eloquent opinion for the majority:

Not only was there no support for such a constitutional right until shortly before Roe, but abortion had long been a crime in every single State. At common law, abortion was criminal in at least some stages of pregnancy and was regarded as unlawful and could have very serious consequences at all stages. American law followed the common law until a wave of statutory restrictions in the 1800s expanded criminal liability for abortions. By the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, three-quarters of the States had made abortion a crime at any stage of pregnancy, and the remaining States would soon follow.

Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division. It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.

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Alas, the returning of the abortion question from the purview of nine unelected white men in 1973 to the vibrant diversity of America in 2022, a country in which the principles of federalism can once again be given free reign, has set off paroxysms of fury on the Left, whose insurrectionary extremists have attacked Christian pro-life centers and called for the abolition of maleness, among other things. The political uses of violence have always appealed to them—that's what the old Sixties concept of "direct action" means, and what "by any means necessary" explicitly embraces—so their hyperventilated overreaction was to be expected. But deep down in the hard core of their animus toward a world whose reality stubbornly refuses to conform with their political ideology, they know peaceful co-existence is impossible. "Pro-choice," my ass: you will be made to care, comrade.

Care about all their transient neuroses, of which their contemporary sexual lunacy is only one of many. There is no stasis in Leftism: you're either breaking boundaries and pushing envelopes and shattering glass ceilings or you're losing. The reason they never stop is that they cannot stop. They can't be satisfied with a small victory. It's all or nothing. It's their fatal flaw, their Achilles heel.

They could have taken their victories and shut up, but they couldn't. They had to push and push and push and push until they finally ended up in court. They can't stop because their rage comes from the vast, burning nihilistic emptiness inside them that no amount of expanded abortion rights or "pride" months or drag queen story hours or transgressive love stories in Disney cartoons can ever satisfy. The two big decisions last week have given them an out: blue-state fantasy homelands of their very own where they're free to abort babies and celebrative 52 genders and chemically castrate their XY birth-defectives and drive magic electric cars and heat and cool their homes with windmills and eat bugs and refuse to defend themselves and defund the police and enforce "equity" and anything else their hearts desire, even if it kills them.

Because, in the end, that's what they really want. An end to their restlessness and their war against their own savage gods. All we want, by contrast, is to be left alone with a culture we love and prize and wish to pass on to our children. But they want to take us with them because, as we all know, misery loves company. Either we'll learn to care, or they'll die trying. Because in their world, right now, everything's coming up guns and Roeses, and they can't have that, not now, not ever.