"This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man's laws, not God's — and if you cut them down … d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?"
Thomas More, "Man for All Seasons"
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Sometimes I ponder the unthinkable. The possibility that Donald J. Trump doesn't know what he's doing.
After two years of ignoring, bending and breaking laws, our esteemed president may live to regret his latest trespass: failing to fire adviser/propagandist Kellyanne Conway.
The Office of Special Counsel, a federal ethics watchdog, urged that Conway be canned for numerous violations of the Hatch Act, a 1939 law that bars most federal and some state employees from electioneering on the job.
The idea of the act is simple. Government employees are paid to work for all of us, not individual candidates or political parties. Until this year, a nonpartisan government workforce was an article of faith.
But Trump is breaking that faith. He refuses to dismiss Conway. To give her the boot for breaking the law, he said, would violate her freedom of speech. Let's face it, Trump is nothing if not a First Amendment champion.
There's one obvious response to Trump's stand: "Let the 2020 election be a sterling monument to unrestricted speech." Especially, for newly liberated federal workers.
Cut down the law and watch the winds howl. I suspect Trump would feel a stiff headwind coming from a partisan federal workforce.
