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Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Opinion - The ‘big, beautiful bill' would secretly dismantle the civil service
The House-passed budget reconciliation bill contains a troubling provision so dangerous and corrosive to the integrity of the federal government that it demands immediate scrutiny and swift rejection by the Senate. Buried in more than 1,000 pages of legislative text is Section 90002, a provision that strikes at the heart of the professional, nonpartisan civil service. It proposes a 9.4 percent salary surcharge on newly hired federal employees who wish to retain their civil service protections, ostensibly to pay for their retirement benefits. Those who cannot afford this effective tax on the rights that federal employees currently enjoy would be forced into permanent at-will employment. Although they would then qualify for a lower retirement deduction of 4.4 percent, as purely at-will employees they could be fired at any time, for any reason — or for no reason at all — with no legal recourse. This is not just bad policy — it is a direct attack on more than 140 years of bipartisan civil service tradition. Our professional civil service was born out of the rampant corruption of the 19th-century 'spoils system,' in which federal jobs were handed out as political favors by victorious candidates. That system came to a halt with the Pendleton Act of 1883, passed after President James Garfield was assassinated by a disgruntled office-seeker who believed he had been improperly denied a patronage job. The Pendleton Act established a competitive, merit-based hiring system and laid the foundation for the modern professional civil service that serves the nation — not the party in power. This commitment was reaffirmed and modernized by the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, signed by President Jimmy Carter. That law improved efficiency and accountability and codified labor rights while protecting employees from arbitrary or politically motivated firings. It also created federal bodies — the Office of Personnel Management, the Federal Labor Relations Authority and the Merit Systems Protection Board — to safeguard merit principles and the integrity of public service. Now, with a single provision rolled out with little debate and no hearing record, the House reconciliation bill threatens to undo all this hard-won progress. If enacted, it would create a two-tier federal workforce: one class protected by civil service laws, and another completely vulnerable to the whims of political appointees. Worse still, the measure is designed to coerce new hires into giving up their rights for the rest of their careers. Faced with a 9.4 percent pay cut, most new federal employees — already earning salaries that are an estimated 25 percent lower than their private-sector counterparts — will feel they have no real choice. Many early-career workers live paycheck to paycheck; this surcharge would be an impossible burden. According to the Congressional Budget Office, three-quarters of new hires would likely be driven into at-will status. Among the 800,000 federal workers I represent as president of the American Federation of Government Employees, few if any could afford to pay the surcharge. That inability to pay is one reason why the provision raises so little money — less than $500 million annually according to the CBO — or just 0.1 percent of the cost of the bill's accompanying tax cuts. Clearly, revenue is not the point. The point is to erode labor rights and weaken the civil service. This provision is also a political time bomb. If passed, it sets a precedent that could be exploited by any future administration. Imagine a newly inaugurated Democratic president firing every at-will federal employee hired during the previous Republican administration — no hearings, no cause, no appeal. If Republicans are willing to set this precedent, they must be prepared to live under it. But the real danger is institutional. How can federal scientists, doctors, safety inspectors or law enforcement officers operate with independence and integrity if they can be dismissed on a whim? These protections are what enable civil servants to speak truth to power — even when that truth is inconvenient. This proposal is also a direct attack on organized labor. Without civil service protections, unions are hamstrung in their ability to represent their members. Workers afraid of being summarily fired are unlikely to file grievances, assert their rights or even speak candidly in meetings. Only those who can afford the surcharge would retain access to effective representation. Section 90002 isn't just misguided — it's union-busting by design. Imagine the outcry if a Democratic Congress imposed a 5 percent income tax on corporations to preserve their rights to challenge unions under the National Labor Relations Act. Republicans would rightly decry this as the weaponization of tax policy. Yet that's precisely what this bill does to federal workers — using financial coercion to undermine their legal protections. The civil service exists to provide stability, expertise and continuity regardless of the party holding office. It is one of the bedrock institutions that has sustained American democracy through wars, crises and peaceful transitions of power. The Trump administration may not like the idea of a government that can resist political manipulation — but that is exactly what democracy requires. Section 90002 is not reform. It is sabotage. Congress must reject it and reaffirm its commitment to the principles that have guided our civil service since 1883. Our institutions — and the American people they serve — deserve no less. Dr. Everett B. Kelley is national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Hill
2 days ago
- Business
- The Hill
The ‘big, beautiful bill' would secretly dismantle the civil service
The House-passed budget reconciliation bill contains a troubling provision so dangerous and corrosive to the integrity of the federal government that it demands immediate scrutiny and swift rejection by the Senate. Buried in more than 1,000 pages of legislative text is Section 90002, a provision that strikes at the heart of the professional, nonpartisan civil service. It proposes a 9.4 percent salary surcharge on newly hired federal employees who wish to retain their civil service protections, ostensibly to pay for their retirement benefits. Those who cannot afford this effective tax on the rights that federal employees currently enjoy would be forced into permanent at-will employment. Although they would then qualify for a lower retirement deduction of 4.4 percent, as purely at-will employees they could be fired at any time, for any reason — or for no reason at all — with no legal recourse. This is not just bad policy — it is a direct attack on more than 140 years of bipartisan civil service tradition. Our professional civil service was born out of the rampant corruption of the 19th-century 'spoils system,' in which federal jobs were handed out as political favors by victorious candidates. That system came to a halt with the Pendleton Act of 1883, passed after President James Garfield was assassinated by a disgruntled office-seeker who believed he had been improperly denied a patronage job. The Pendleton Act established a competitive, merit-based hiring system and laid the foundation for the modern professional civil service that serves the nation — not the party in power. This commitment was reaffirmed and modernized by the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, signed by President Jimmy Carter. That law improved efficiency and accountability and codified labor rights while protecting employees from arbitrary or politically motivated firings. It also created federal bodies — the Office of Personnel Management, the Federal Labor Relations Authority and the Merit Systems Protection Board — to safeguard merit principles and the integrity of public service. Now, with a single provision rolled out with little debate and no hearing record, the House reconciliation bill threatens to undo all this hard-won progress. If enacted, it would create a two-tier federal workforce: one class protected by civil service laws, and another completely vulnerable to the whims of political appointees. Worse still, the measure is designed to coerce new hires into giving up their rights for the rest of their careers. Faced with a 9.4 percent pay cut, most new federal employees — already earning salaries that are an estimated 25 percent lower than their private-sector counterparts — will feel they have no real choice. Many early-career workers live paycheck to paycheck; this surcharge would be an impossible burden. According to the Congressional Budget Office, three-quarters of new hires would likely be driven into at-will status. Among the 800,000 federal workers I represent as president of the American Federation of Government Employees, few if any could afford to pay the surcharge. That inability to pay is one reason why the provision raises so little money — less than $500 million annually according to the CBO — or just 0.1 percent of the cost of the bill's accompanying tax cuts. Clearly, revenue is not the point. The point is to erode labor rights and weaken the civil service. This provision is also a political time bomb. If passed, it sets a precedent that could be exploited by any future administration. Imagine a newly inaugurated Democratic president firing every at-will federal employee hired during the previous Republican administration — no hearings, no cause, no appeal. If Republicans are willing to set this precedent, they must be prepared to live under it. But the real danger is institutional. How can federal scientists, doctors, safety inspectors or law enforcement officers operate with independence and integrity if they can be dismissed on a whim? These protections are what enable civil servants to speak truth to power — even when that truth is inconvenient. This proposal is also a direct attack on organized labor. Without civil service protections, unions are hamstrung in their ability to represent their members. Workers afraid of being summarily fired are unlikely to file grievances, assert their rights or even speak candidly in meetings. Only those who can afford the surcharge would retain access to effective representation. Section 90002 isn't just misguided — it's union-busting by design. Imagine the outcry if a Democratic Congress imposed a 5 percent income tax on corporations to preserve their rights to challenge unions under the National Labor Relations Act. Republicans would rightly decry this as the weaponization of tax policy. Yet that's precisely what this bill does to federal workers — using financial coercion to undermine their legal protections. The civil service exists to provide stability, expertise and continuity regardless of the party holding office. It is one of the bedrock institutions that has sustained American democracy through wars, crises and peaceful transitions of power. The Trump administration may not like the idea of a government that can resist political manipulation — but that is exactly what democracy requires. Section 90002 is not reform. It is sabotage. Congress must reject it and reaffirm its commitment to the principles that have guided our civil service since 1883. Our institutions — and the American people they serve — deserve no less. Dr. Everett B. Kelley is national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO.
Yahoo
21-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump's moves to strip employment protections from federal workers threaten to make government function worse
On top of efforts to fire potentially tens of thousands of federal workers, an early executive order from President Donald Trump's second term seeks to reclassify the employment status of as many as 50,000 other federal workers – out of more than 2 million total – to make them easier for the president to fire as well. The order has already been challenged in court by two federal workers' unions and other interest groups, though no judge has yet issued any orders. The Trump administration is drafting rules to put the order into effect. The Conversation U.S. politics editor Jeff Inglis spoke to James Perry, a scholar of public affairs at Indiana University, Bloomington, to understand what the order is trying to achieve and how it would affect federal workers, the government and the American public. What follows is an edited transcript of the discussion. What is the standard situation for government employees? In the 1820s and 1830s, President Andrew Jackson popularized the idea that the president could, and should, hire supporters into government jobs. But by the early 1880s, there was concern on the parts of both Democrats and Republicans that the victor would control a lot of workers who would serve the president, not the American people whose tax dollars paid their salaries. So the parties came together in 1883 to pass the Pendleton Act stipulating that government workers are hired based on their skills and abilities, not their political views. That law was updated in 1978 with the Civil Service Reform Act, which added more protections for workers against being fired for political reasons. Those rules cover about 99% of staff in the federal civil service. Currently, there are just about 4,000 political appointees. I've seen various estimates that this new executive order would shift at least 50,000 positions from career positions to the political-appointments list. Some states, such as Mississippi, Texas, Georgia and Florida, have moved to strip employment protections from state government employees, turning protected employees into at-will workers, who can be fired at any time for any reason. These are largely red states, with strong control by Republican governors. Supporters of this move at the federal level argue that at-will employment can work in federal civil service. This argument is not backed by strong evidence. The evidence supporters offer is that human resources directors, who are often appointees of the governor who changed the statute, claim no one has complained about the change in policy. But that doesn't include people who are likely to have a different perspective. It could be that nobody is talking about people being fired for political reasons in these states because they are afraid of getting fired themselves. What does this executive order change, and why? The rationale for the new policy is that the administration wants to get rid of federal workers whom leaders perceive as either intransigent or insubordinate – or who they fear might oppose Trump's policy initiatives. This sets up a conflict between how government workers see their duties and how Trump appears to view them. Federal employees interviewed by sociologist Jamie Kucinskas during Trump's first term say they are obligated to look beyond the president's bidding: They took an oath to the Constitution when they started their jobs, and their salaries and benefits are paid for with taxpayer dollars. Trump, by contrast, says workers in the executive branch must answer to him and follow his orders. Trump and others have tried to cloak this effort in language about removing workers who perform poorly at their jobs. That concern is legitimate. The Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, which surveys hundreds of thousands of federal workers every year about various aspects of their work and working conditions, indicates that in 2024, 40% of those surveyed said people who perform poorly are not fired and do not improve. But taking action against only 50,000 of the 2 million-plus federal employees isn't going to address such a wide problem. There's a stereotype that in government it can be hard to discipline or fire workers who are not competent at their jobs. The flip side of that stereotype is, however, false: Private businesses are not better at holding poor performers accountable. Survey evidence shows the private sector has just as much difficulty as the government with getting workers to perform effectively. There's room for legitimate disagreement about how far federal employees have to go to comply with presidential directives. The people who think loyalty is the key to merit still might not agree on whether that loyalty is owed to the person sitting in the Oval Office or to the Constitution. How does this affect government workers? It's not clear which positions might be targeted. The order calls them 'policy influencing positions,' but drawing the line between policy and administration isn't always easy. It's also not clear whether the change will stick. When the George W. Bush administration reduced job protections for Department of Homeland Security employees in 2005, a major federal workers' union sued the administration and won. In the first round of this effort under the first Trump administration, it seemed that most of the people affected would be at the top of the federal hierarchy, probably mostly based in Washington, D.C. Most of the workers in the federal civil service, though, are not there. They work for the Social Security Administration, giving out checks in Bloomington, Indiana, or other departments and offices around the country. It would be very difficult to classify them as influencing political policy or advocating for policies. But there are people who are not Senate-confirmed who do have an influence on policy. For instance, at the Department of Justice, assistant and deputy assistant secretaries have influence on civil rights policy or other policies that affect the president's ability to pursue his agenda. The February 2025 resignation of Danielle Sassoon from her role as U.S. attorney in New York is an example of legitimate divergence between an appointee and the president's policy direction. Any workers who lost their protections would likely feel threatened with losing their job and their livelihood. They might, out of fear, be more responsive to the dictates of their superiors. That might sound good – that if you do what your boss says, you're doing a good job. But it's different if your obligations are to the public interest and the Constitution. How does this affect everyday Americans? Large majorities of Americans believe government workers are serving the public over themselves. And as many as 87% of Americans say they want a merit-based, politically neutral civil service. The U.S. has attracted to government service workers who are good at their jobs and able to remain politically neutral at work. Saying that's no longer important would change the relationship between government workers and their jobs. And it would hurt the nation as a whole if government cannot attract the best and the brightest, or if it sends the best and the brightest packing because they are not comfortable with their work situation, or if they stay but their performance declines. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: James L. Perry, Indiana University Read more: Firing civil servants and dismantling government departments is how aspiring strongmen consolidate personal power – lessons from around the globe Politicians may rail against the 'deep state,' but research shows federal workers are effective and committed, not subversive The dangers of 'Jekyll and Hyde leadership': Why making amends after workplace abuse can hurt more than it helps James L. Perry does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Axios
19-02-2025
- Politics
- Axios
DOGE dismantles the job security of federal work
DOGE-led mass firings of federal employees are tearing at the promise of job security that's come with government work for more than a century. Why it matters: Millions of federal workers are now feeling the same kind of job anxiety more familiar to those in corporate America, including the tech sector, where Elon Musk's firing playbook is far more common. What they're saying: "This is not the same government it was a month ago," a longtime federal employee told Axios, requesting anonymity because they've accepted the administration's "deferred resignation" offer and don't want to jeopardize it. "The mentality that federal workers have — that their jobs are protected — none of that exists anymore," they said. Yes, but: The White House said it's within its rights to fire probationary workers, who don't have the same kinds of protections as longer-term employees. "The probationary period is a continuation of the job application process, not an entitlement for permanent employment," per policy guidelines shared by an administration official. "Agencies are taking independent action in line with the recent hiring freeze and the President's broader efforts to restructure and streamline the federal government," per the guidance, which notes agencies should focus on retaining the highest-performing employees. Not all workers who've been fired were probationary, including those at USAID and terminated inspectors general. Others had previously received strong performance reviews but were told they were being fired for performance reasons anyway. Zoom out: To understand why civil service jobs differ from private sector jobs, you need to go back to the 19th century, when the U.S. government was staffed by a " spoils system" in which people were hired based on connections or even because they paid for the job. After President Garfield was assassinated in 1881 by a man who was upset he didn't get a government gig, Congress enacted a civil service law called the Pendleton Act, to ensure folks were hired based on merit and skill. Today, most federal jobs are handled in this system. Only a few thousand positions are held by political appointees. How it works: Government workers have a lot more job protections than those in the private sector. A provision in federal law states that government workers can't be discriminated against based on their political activity. Layoffs aren't supposed to be random, and there's a process that's supposed to determine who is fired first. Job listings must be posted, including those involving promotions, so everyone has a chance to apply and be judged by an impartial panel. Pay scales are public, and that's why for years gender and racial pay gaps in the federal government have been lower than in the private sector. By the numbers: Federal workers also have far more union protections. 30% of public sector federal government employees are represented by unions, compared to 7% in the private sector, according to federal data. All of this "gives people a lot of security to work hard, do their jobs and not worry about playing personality politics," said David Super, a professor at Georgetown Law, whose research focuses on administrative law. For the record: "President Trump returned to Washington with a mandate from the American people to bring about unprecedented change in our federal government to uproot waste, fraud, and abuse," White House principal deputy press secretary Harrison Fields said in a statement. "This isn't easy to do in a broken system entrenched in bureaucracy and bloat, but it's a task long overdue." The bottom line: Until recently, taking a job with the federal government meant accepting lower pay in order to reap the rewards of job security. Now the rewards haven't changed, but the risks are skyrocketing. Are you a federal employee with a tip? You can reach Emily Peck confidentially on Signal @emilyrpeck.71.
Yahoo
15-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Government Workers Cannot Be Fired for Their Political Views
Just a few years ago, then-Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio said that if Donald Trump were reelected, he would advise the president to 'fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state' and 'replace them with our people.' Nearly four weeks into his new term, Trump appears to be executing that plan, attempting to fire or place on administrative leave thousands of federal employees perceived to be politically adverse to him, and reclassifying many more to make them fireable at will. Those hired in their stead will be vetted by Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency, thanks to a new executive order. Last week, two sets of FBI employees filed the first lawsuits challenging these moves on First Amendment grounds. Both allege that the employees were targeted as a form of retaliation. The essence of a First Amendment retaliation claim is that although the government may deny someone a valuable benefit for any number of reasons, 'there are some reasons upon which the government may not rely,' including, pointedly, someone's 'constitutionally protected speech or associations.' The plaintiffs in the FBI cases allege that the Trump administration is demanding a list of 6,000 agents involved in investigating the January 6 and Mar-a-Lago cases in order to possibly punish or purge thousands of agents Trump perceives (surely wrongly in many instances) to be politically opposed to him. The FBI employees should win their First Amendment claims, especially if any mass purge takes place. [Tom Nichols: Trump and Musk are destroying the basics of a healthy democracy] Zooming out, thousands of other federal employees could well make similar constitutional claims, because what the Trump administration is doing with the FBI appears to be but a small part of a much larger effort to resurrect a government-wide political-patronage system, something the First Amendment forbids. From the founding until 1883, a 'spoils'—as in, 'to the victor belong the spoils'—system of political patronage took root and flourished in the federal government. New administrations would fire federal officials belonging to the other party and hire their own people. President Andrew Jackson became particularly associated with the spoils system after campaigning on rooting out corruption and firing nearly 10 percent of federal employees, replacing many with supporters upon taking office, but he was far from the only president to reward political cronies with federal jobs, as the University of Pennsylvania law professor Kate Shaw has explained. Political-patronage systems promote corruption at the expense of effective governance, and Americans grew dissatisfied with the cronyism and moblike rule that flowed from the spoils system. Following decades of effort to enact civil-service reform, momentum surged when a disgruntled office-seeker assassinated President James Garfield in 1881. In response, Congress passed the Pendleton Act in 1883 to 'regulate and improve the civil service of the United States,' establishing a merit-based system for federal hiring. Under the current federal civil-service regime, fewer than 4,000 federal employees—including constitutional officers, such as the attorney general and secretary of state, and top agency officials—serve at the president's pleasure, fireable for political disagreements or pretty much any other reason. The overwhelming majority of the more than 2 million workers who daily serve the American people in the federal civil service are wisely protected from political firings. That protection flows from something even deeper than the Pendleton Act and other federal statutes. In 1947, the Supreme Court was faced with a First Amendment challenge to the Hatch Act, which limits the extent to which most federal officials can engage in overt political activity while in office. The Court upheld the act but made clear that the First Amendment would prohibit Congress from directly restricting the ability to hold federal offices to members of one party, such as by enacting 'a regulation providing that no Republican … shall be appointed to federal office.' Notwithstanding the Court's guidance, the worst practices of political patronage continued to crop up in state and local governments, forcing the Supreme Court to elaborate the point and put a stop to spoils practices in a series of cases. The most relevant case to our present-day situation began in 1980, when Republican Illinois Governor Jim Thompson issued an executive order freezing all hiring across state agencies absent express permission from his office. Requests for exceptions became routine, and an agency was set up inside the governor's office to vet them. Five job-seekers sued, claiming that in practice, the order and exceptions were being used to create a political-patronage system favoring Republicans. [Annie Lowrey: Civil servants are not America's enemies] When the case reached the Supreme Court, the Court held that systems of political patronage like the one established by Thompson violate the First Amendment. Quoting one of its first patronage decisions, the Court reaffirmed that 'conditioning public employment on the provision of support for the favored political party 'unquestionably inhibits protected belief and association.'' Doing so 'pressures employees to pledge political allegiance to a party with which they prefer not to associate, to work for the election of political candidates they do not support, and to contribute money to be used to further policies with which they do not agree.' It is 'tantamount to coerced belief,' something the First Amendment plainly forbids. Nor did it matter that Thompson had not issued a direct order specifying that only Republicans would be hired, because 'what the First Amendment precludes the government from commanding directly, it also precludes the government from accomplishing indirectly.' There is an exception to the First Amendment bar on political hirings and firings. Those officials in legitimate policy making positions can be dismissed for political reasons without offending the Constitution. That's because in America's representative democracy, it is important that lawful policy reflects the political will of the voters, as voiced by the executive. But the executive cannot simply label large numbers of officials 'policy makers' and render them all fireable at will. Instead, courts must look through labels to the substance of an official's role and determine whether political alignment is necessary in that role. In any given dispute, the government has the burden of demonstrating that a particular position is in fact a policy-making one before the job-holder may be fired based on raw political allegiance. The Trump administration seems set on flouting this precedent. Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump and those around him signaled that the MAGA movement would expect total loyalty from federal officials. On Inauguration Day, after taking office, Trump suggested that 'all' of the 'Biden bureaucrats' should be fired. The same day, Trump signed one executive order to freeze much merit-based federal hiring, and he signed another that will help him consolidate political control over existing employees. The latter order conveniently expanded the number of officials to be classified as policy makers—from fewer than 4,000 to potentially hundreds of thousands. The administration also expanded the type of agency hiring authority that would make bringing in loyalists easier. And late last month, federal employees were informed by email that the majority of federal agencies are likely to downsize, and that loyalty will be a determining factor in deciding who stays. Meanwhile, purges of employees whom Trump likely views as politically misaligned with him have begun to roll out across agencies. The administration has directed agencies to fire most probationary staff, nearly all of whom were hired during the Biden administration. Department of Education employees were reportedly put on leave for simply attending a DEI training in 2017. The FBI officials who sued say they have reason to believe that the Department of Justice is planning to engage in the mass unlawful firing of agents who had any involvement in certain investigations related to President Trump, including the January 6 cases, and the lawful search of Trump's residence at Mar-a-Lago. DOJ attorneys involved in the January 6 prosecutions were terminated because their work on those cases purportedly would prevent them from 'faithfully' implementing Trump's agenda. At the beginning of February, the administration moved to shut down USAID entirely. Although the administration explains the move as aimed at preventing waste and fraud, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said—without citing any evidence to support the improbable claim—that the Trump administration had determined that '98 percent of the [USAID] workforce either donated to Kamala Harris or another left-wing candidate,' and Elon Musk posted on X, 'USAID was a viper's nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.' As for replacing those fired, Trump signed a new executive order this week, directing that all future career-appointment hiring decisions be made in consultation with a team lead from Musk's DOGE. [Anne Applebaum: There's a term for what Trump and Musk are doing] Taken together, the administration's actions bear a striking resemblance to the Illinois patronage scheme that the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional: freeze hiring, purge perceived political opponents, and consolidate all hiring and staffing decisions in a body close to the executive. The Trump administration clearly knows that the First Amendment prohibits resurrecting a government-wide political-patronage system. That Inauguration Day executive order expanding the number of purported policy makers claims that 'employees in or applicants for Schedule Policy/Career positions are not required to personally or politically support the current President or the policies of the current administration.' Similarly, the administration's implementing guidance, issued at the end of January, in fact cites the Supreme Court's anti-patronage decisions, specifying that 'Patronage Remains Prohibited.' But the administration's actions and statements suggest that the resurrection of a political-patronage system is well under way. Particularly if political purges continue, courts must see the anti-patronage posturing as pretext and enforce the First Amendment. As the Supreme Court memorably put it in the Illinois case, 'To the victor belong only those spoils that may be constitutionally obtained.' Article originally published at The Atlantic
