While the Senate and the media have been preoccupied with the Bork and Biden controversies, the House has been getting into some mischief of its own. All of a sudden, without any warning, a truly revolutionary bill unanimously passed a House committee.
If this bill ever becomes law, it will allow all federal employees, including all those in Civil Service, to run for office, manage political campaigns, and solicit political contributions.
Civil servants are now barred from such acts by the 48-year-old law called the Hatch Act (no relation to Senator Orrin Hatch).
Just because a law is 48 years old does not mean that we should assume it was written irrevocably on stone tablets. But it does mean that, when a proposal is made to junk it, we should have a general debate so that the public can be apprised of the reasons why a previous generation adopted the law, and then be able to make a current, democratic determination as to whether those arguments are still valid.
Yet, without any discussion in the press or public affairs TV programs, or any demand from the general public, House leaders of both parties hatched a plan to spring repeal of the Hatch Act on the public.
“I have waited 12 years for this,” said Rep. William L. Clay (D-MO), sponsor of the new legislation. It’s easy to see why leftwing Democrat Clay would be enthusiastic about this bill, but it’s hard to see how any fiscal conservative of either party could acquiesce in such a maneuver.
Political consultants are predicting that passage of this bill would have a “dramatic impact.” The bill, if approved, would have a powerful and perhaps decisive impact in those Congressional districts with a significant percentage of federal workers (such as northern Virginia and Maryland).
The greatest impact would probably be in the metropolitan area of Washington, D.C., where 357,552 federal and postal workers make up the largest concentration of federal employees. Washington, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry has been working against the Hatch Act limitations for years, while the lone Republican on the D.C. City Council, Carol Schwartz, says candidly, “I do think if you lifted Hatch Act restrictions, there would be tremendous pressure on the 40,000 [District] employees to work for the incumbent mayor, no matter who that is.”
Those who participate in political campaigns do so in order to elect public officials who reflect the interests of those doing the politicking. The interest of federal employees is always in behalf of higher taxes on the rest of the country to pay for the continued expansion of the federal bureaucracy and its payroll.
Repeal of the Hatch Act would unleash a torrent of tax-salaried activists into the political process where they would campaign for the perpetuation of their own jobs, the funding of their pet projects, and the election of Congressmen and other public officials who would vote for those goals. The already overburdened taxpayer should not be subjected to that kind of political pressure from tax-salaried personnel.
The bill’s sponsors say that their repeal legislation contains strict rules against using government time for political activities, and also against political coercion by government officials. Anyone who believes that probably also believes in the tooth fairy.
The Hatch Act repeal bill is aggressively supported by the three largest federal and postal labor unions whose leaders are salivating at the prospect of injecting themselves actively into the political election process. They claim that federal employees “have been stepped on too long” and are now “denied first-class citizenship.”
Any argument that federal employees are “stepped on” is ridiculous. They receive higher wages, longer vacations, more benefits, and have more job security than most Americans. Holding a federal job is a privilege, not a right, and those who take a federal job should accept Hatch restrictions because the American people deserve this assurance that their tax dollars are not directly or indirectly subsidizing political activities by people whose full-time job involves spending the taxpayers’ money.
The Reagan Administration has not yet said where it stands on this issue. However, Director Constance Horner of the Office of Personnel Management has cautioned that we object to any rush to jettison four decades of bipartisan commitment to a nonpartisan civil service.
