President Trump's 2nd Term.

[B-Man]

 

 

 Trump knows personnel is policy. Does the President have the authority to

hire and fire his agents and underlings? The Constitution says yes.

 

“Personnel is policy.” As far as I have been able to discover, that slogan gained currency in the Reagan administration. But it articulates a truth that political thinkers from Aristotle to Machiavelli to James Madison appreciated. The first line of Article II of the Constitution reads: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” That’s “a President.” Only one. Not “a President and a bunch of district court judges.” Not “a President and sundry federal agencies staffed by unaccountable bureaucrats.”

 

Over the course of many decades, the sublimely uncluttered principle articulated at the beginning of Article II has been undermined and stymied, like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, by what we have come to call the administrative state. What is the administrative state? It is difficult to take precise measure of this amorphous, protean, self-engorging organism. But one salient characteristic is its habit of substituting judicial intervention for constitutional principle.

 

“Personnel is policy.” Does the President have the authority to hire and fire his agents and underlings? The Constitution says yes. The administrative state, supported by a battalion of liberal judges and scrambling litigants, says “not so fast.”

 

As I write, the Trump administration is contending with some 300 lawsuits. Many have to do with agencies he wishes to trim or abolish, previously appropriated funds he wishes to divert or sequester, employees he wishes to fire. So far, the Supreme Court has, if in somewhat piecemeal fashion, mostly sided with Trump. The executive, the Court has recognized, ought to be allowed to execute, viz “to carry out or put into effect a plan, order, or course of action.” Inherent in that power is the President’s prerogative of “making the best possible appointments.” Why? because personnel is policy. Agents of the administrative state also understand this principle. It’s just that they believe that power, or at least large swaths of it, should rest with them, not the President. They do not have the Constitution on their side. But they do have a litany of legal decisions which have accumulated like barnacles on the hull of the ship of state, rotting its timbers, impeding its progress.

 

https://thespectator.com/topic/trump-knows-personnel-is-policy/