GOP Hates Workers' Rights Until They Lose Their Jobs

It looks like there was a reason the Trump administration wanted to know which federal employees worked on climate change and gender equality. The new rules that the House passed to govern the 115th Congress included the resurrection of procedural rule that was devised in 1876 but had been dropped since 1983. That rule would allow any member of the House to add an amendment to any appropriations bill that would specifically target the wages of a specific federal worker or workers or eliminate those jobs entirely. In theory, the worker’s pay could be mandated to drop as low as $1. The amendment would still have to pass both the House and the Senate, but that should be no problem with Republicans holding a majority in both houses.Needless to say, this could put quite a chilling effect on the federal workforce and adds to the fears created by the Trump transition’s requests. Hopefully, Democrats could make creative use of this new power to potentially gum of the works of some of the most egregious House actions, perhaps slashing whole swaths of employees in the Pentagon. Let’s see how the GOP would react to that.

In the same way that Trump is a serial abuser, so Republicans seem to be when they are in power, as evidenced by the abusive nature of the above rule. But it’s amazing how things change when they get out of power and their jobs are actually threatened. In the recently formed banana republic of North Carolina, the outgoing Secretary of the State Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), Donald Van Der Vaart, was going to be out of a job when Democrat Roy Cooper took over as Governor. But Van Der Vaart decided that government work actually suited him. So he demoted himself to merely an environmental program manager. Now, as a regular civil servant in North Carolina, Van Der Vaart enjoys job protections that may protect him from being fired by Cooper. Van Der Vaart had opposed Cooper’s decision not to oppose new greenhouse gas emission rules proposed by the Obama administration. It would therefore be doubtful that Cooper’s new Secretary of the DEQ would actually give any work to Van Der Vaart, meaning that he may get civil service protection to keep the $97,000 per year job by just basically showing up. My inclination would be to get him to write endless reports that could basically be ignored.

All this goes to show that the GOP loves to abuse workers and unions when they have the power. But when their job is threatened, all of a sudden all those workers’ protections suddenly must not be violated.