Frugal Café Blog Zone

Posted By Vicki McClure Davidson on August 4, 2009

Hans A. von Spakovsky served for two years as a Commissioner on the Federal Election Commission. His recess appointment ended on December 31, 2007, when the Senate failed to confirm him because of Democratic opposition to his regular nomination over his support of voter ID requirements despite the Supreme Court upholding their constitutionality. Prior to his appointment to the FEC, he spent four years at the Justice Department, the last three as a career Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division.

Von Spakovsky is an expert in campaign finance, voter fraud, voter identification laws, registration, and equipment issues. And a skilled writer, IMHO.

Von Spakovsky has written a riveting, eye-opening piece which is published on the Pajamas Media website, explaining why Washington is so reluctant to adopt conservative policies. Portions of the first two parts of the three-part series are provided here.

Knowledge is power… highly recommended reading to better understand what we’re up against.

In Washington, Conservatives Are Never Really ‘In Power’
Pajamas Media
By Hans A. von Spakovsky

With the end of the Bush administration, and the beginning of the most liberal administration in American history, it is a good time to take stock of what happened over the past eight years.

Conservatives get very frustrated over the failure of Republican administrations in general to change the course of the federal government. They do not understand why an executive branch “controlled” by a Republican president continued to implement liberal policies and regulations. Examples abound over the past eight years — from the Department of Justice’s all-out enforcement of foreign language ballots, to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s refusal to act against companies that engage in reverse racial discrimination on the basis of “diversity,” to the discriminatory awarding of federal contracts on the basis of race that continued in every federal department from Transportation to Commerce.

However, Republicans (much less conservatives) are not really in control of the executive branch even when they occupy the White House, something that most people (especially conservatives outside of Washington) do not fully understand.

Part of the problem can be a failure of presidential leadership. After all, a president’s advisors and political appointees are supposed to carry out what they perceive to be his views and direction. When a Republican president does not make it clear that he expects conservative principles to be followed throughout the executive branch, then no attempt will be made by his political appointees to change liberal policies at the Department of Education, the Department of Justice, or any other federal agency. Even when you have a conservative president, there are a number of other significant reasons why the federal government remains a champion of liberalism. These reasons are inherent in the structure of the executive branch, the employees who make up its ranks, and the occupants of the capitol, both inside and outside of government.

Click here to read more of Part 1

Opening text of Part 2

Conservative? Ethical? There’s No Room for You in Government

The few fellow conservatives I found in the career ranks of the Justice Department were usually people who would only secretly admit their views.

At work, they maintain the fiction that they are liberals or apolitical in order to avoid retribution. Those who are openly conservative usually have given up on ever getting promoted or are in dead-end career slots.

Once a conservative is embedded into the civil service, he becomes beholden to careerist middle managers for salary increases, vacation approval, stimulating assignments, and even office location. Conservatives worried about kids, mortgages, good benefits, and glowing performance reviews can be quick to abandon pesky principles when faced with ideologically hostile middle mangers.

The absolute fury and unrelenting hostility that I encountered as an openly conservative career lawyer at the Justice Department was something that had to be seen to be believed.

I was shunned from almost my first day on the job. My fellow career employees made it very clear that they would do everything they could to destroy me personally and professionally and drive me out of government. The only way a conservative career employee can survive isolation and pariah status is if Republican political appointees make a point of ensuring that liberal career managers do not bar conservatives from being hired or promoted, something that rarely happens.

This situation is tough to remedy, paradoxically because so few conservatives are interested in applying for government jobs. The point of this is not to hire individuals based on their political party status, but to hire qualified professionals with a conservative view of government (and the limits on its power) who will carry out the policies of conservative political appointees, instead of ignoring or fighting those policies because they disagree with them.

This critical mass of liberal career employees makes it very difficult for political appointees to implement conservative policies. The career employees do everything they can to directly and indirectly thwart those policies. I saw career employees misrepresent the law and conceal critical facts in order to oppose and stop the implementation of policies with which they disagreed.

Another tactic is to simply ignore policy directives or orders to make changes. This was aptly described by Stephen Hayes in the Weekly Standard when he related how career employees at the CIA managed to push Porter Goss out, and stop all of the changes he was trying to make, by simply slowing down or ignoring all of his directives.

Any conservative political appointee who relies on memoranda, information, or advice developed by career employees without double-checking the facts and scrutinizing the analysis is making a serious mistake. Career employees cannot be relied on to give nonpartisan, objective analysis on almost any issue. In fact, it was common to hear career employees talk about how much they hated Republicans and hated President Bush.

Many of them acted as if they worked for one of the many liberal advocacy organizations that infest Washington. This was aptly described with respect to the Department of Justice in a redistricting case arising out of Georgia in the 1990s, where a federal district court criticized the Department’s lawyers for behaving like the in-house counsel of the ACLU (and then having very convenient memory lapses about their interactions with the ACLU when questioned about it). It has only gotten worse since that decision.

One of my friends was a career staffer in the Department of Education, where most of the staff acted as if they were the NEA’s personal representatives in the Department. Another friend is a career lawyer who works on environmental issues at the Justice Department. Most of his fellow career employees think they are working for the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, rather than the American people…

Click here for the rest of Part 2

More hatred this week from left-wing extremists: “I hope Glenn Beck kills himself”

Additional reading of value:
GayPatriot: To Critics of Republicans: Show me the Legislation where GOP pushes its beliefs on others and “The meanest people in American politics are on the left” and Why Aren’t Feminists Upset With David Letterman? and Name-calling: the supposedly smart set’s preferred means to respond to gay marriage opponents and others offering a politically incorrect point of view
John Loudon, Big Government: The Moral Hazard of Big Governments
Burt Prelutsky, Big Hollywood: A Little Straight Talk
The Patriot’s Mind: Left is Attacking Capitalism – Not Just Health Insurance
Brandon Darby, Big Government: Former Leftist Activist, Turned FBI Informant, Pulls Back the Curtain On ACORN
Michelle Malkin: Culture of Corruption: Cold Cash edition and This is what mob rule looks like and Protest a health care town hall; more scenes from the counterinsurgency and Welcome to Czarist Amerika
Big Hollywood: Did You Hear About the Morgans Trashing Sarah Palin?
NewsBusters: White House Attacks Drudge for Exposing Obama’s Goal to Eliminate Private Health Insurance
Jeffrey Jena, Big Hollywood: Stand Up Notes From Flyover Country: CARS Program Previews Obamacare

Jim Blazsik: Miss California and the Spirit of the Age
The Western Experience: More shameful intolerance from the tyrannical left and gay totalitarians.
Vets On The Watch: If You Disagree, You Are A Dumb Bitch
John Romano, Big Hollywood: Race Only Matters When it Favors Democrats
The Sundries Shack: Live Free or Don’t. Whatever.
Jonah Goldberg, National Review Online: Empathy vs. Impartiality
Big Hollywood: Ben Stein: ‘John Hughes was an avid Republican’
Gallup Poll: Blacks as Conservative as Republicans on Some Moral Issues
Hot Air: Megan Fox: If only we didn’t have these white-trash Bible-beating hillbillies in middle America
The Substratum: Obama Tries To Piss On The Public And Tell Us Its Raining
Michael McGruther, Big Hollywood: Moral Relativism; The Liberal Lynchpin
StopthePresses2: Guy who reported lies about Palin “divorce” hides behind children
Ann Coulter: Watching MSNBC Is Torture

Frugal Café Blog Zone: Why Are Conservatives So Mean? and Bravo, Elisabeth… Elisabeth Hasselbeck Goes After Playboy for Disgusting ‘Hate-Rape of Top 10 Conservative Women’ Article (video) and Why Sarah Palin Drives Female Liberals Crazy and The Savaging of Sarah Palin and the ‘Uncouthness’ of Barack Obama and Ann Coulter, in Defense of Christian Beauty Queen Carrie Prejean: ‘Liberals Are Ferocious Misogynists’
The B.S. Report: Easy As ABC… President Obama’s Official “State-Run” Media
Greg Gutfeld, Big Hollywood: Daily Gut: America Ranks 114th on the ‘Happy Planet Index’ and Daily Gut: The Reign of Race
David Keene, TheHill.com: Injustice against whites
Frank DiMartini, Big Hollywood: The End of Reverse Discrimination?
The American Pundit: Breaking: William Jefferson Convicted of Bribery

Categories: Conservatism, Government, Knowledge, Law & Constitution, Media & Communication, National Security, Social and Political Climate
Tags: America, Americans against ObamaCare, Bush administration, conservative, Democrat, Hans A. von Spakovsky, liberal, liberalism, Obama administration, Pajamas Media, political, politics, Republican, statism, von Spakovsky, Washington DC