Kellyanne Conway (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty)
If we’re being honest, the Hatch Act is annoying. It’s an 80-year-old law that prohibits federal employees from electioneering on the government’s time that has way more to do with appearances than reality. We know that political appointees are partisan. We know they spend most of their waking hours advancing their partisan agendas. The distinction between whether they’re doing it “at work” or not is a legal fiction, especially in the modern era where “at work” can easily encompass “all the time.”
Presidential propaganda officer, Kellyanne Conway, has been flagrantly violating the Hatch Act. It’s so bad that the Office of Special Counsel (not to be confused with Robert Mueller’s now-defunct position) has taken the unprecedented step of telling President Donald Trump to remove Conway.
He won’t, of course. Trump just publicly said he won’t fire his “loyal” advisor. Conway’s shameless electioneering is what he pays her to do. And Conway won’t care, because she knows the only thing her boss cares about is loyalty, not following the law. And Kellyanne Conway’s husband, George Conway, won’t care, because George’s attempts to re-make his slavish support for the Federalist Society assault on the nation’s judiciary as “Never Trump” principled disagreement only involves saying mean things on Twitter while looking the other way as his wife gaslights America.
Most likely the American people won’t care, because Kellyanne’s Hatch Act violations are not even the most flagrant violation of the rule of law the Trump administration has contemplated THIS WEEK. Trump has spent most of the week soliciting foreign help to influence the 2020 election, then pretending he’s not doing just that.
But before Conway’s Hatch Act violations are retired to the dustbin of “illegal stuff the Trump administration does on the reg,” I want to point out that this kind of open violation of a petty law like the Hatch Act vitiates the rule of law even more than some of Trump’s more egregious illicit activities.
Everybody violates the law sometimes. Everybody can think of that one time they drove over the speed limit or ingested an illicit substance or left dog poop on the street (though, the latter of you people should be shot). We have an impression that we, as humans, violate laws all the time, and since we expect Trump to act no better than a hormonal 15-year-old, sometimes his more petty violations feel like mere technicalities as opposed to serious problems.
But, most people, most of the time, follow the law, for no reason other than it happens to be the law. We don’t run red lights even when nobody is around, we don’t piss in the elevator, we don’t maliciously defame our enemies, we don’t solicit prostitution, we don’t leave the restaurant without paying our bill, we don’t cosh random black people in London. We follow laws we don’t even agree with. We follow laws that cost us time, money, and effort. We live in a free country and yet we follow totally stupid and unenforceable laws all the time. Why? It’s a tenuous thing. We follow the law because we imagine other people are also following the law and we perceive it’s in our societal self-interest for them to do so. We follow the law because we want other people to follow the law, and we don’t want to be the ones to ruin it for everybody.
The Hatch Act is one of those background laws. It’s not particularly important. People don’t really know why it’s there. It’s just a thing. It’s just a rule. People follow it because it’s a rule. For most people, that’s enough.
But not for Trump. And not for the people willing to work for him. And not for the Republicans enabling Trump. Trump and his administration have no moral or ethical center. They have no desire to be moral or ethical. NO RULE is accorded any deference just because it’s a rule. NO RULE is viewed through any other lens than how it helps Trump. Rules that help Trump should be strictly followed and enforced, rules that don’t help Trump should be entirely ignored.
It’s the definition of lawlessness. If everybody acted like Trump, it would be actual anarchy. But Trump and Conway count on people not acting like they do, so they can still have a society to pillage.
The problem that Trump and Conway don’t care about and moderate Democrats don’t perceive, is that once you have a guy like Trump who doesn’t respect any of the laws and receives no punishment for it, there’s no going back. There’s no going back to people slavishly following rules, just because they are rules, once we know that other people don’t follow the rules and face no consequences. If the laws no longer protects us from the bad behavior of others, then there’s no reason for anybody else to follow them.
Think about it this way: The Hatch Act is dead now. NOBODY has to follow it anymore. Not anybody else in the Trump administration, not anybody in future administrations. Kellyanne Conway has taken the Hatch Act from us, for whatever it was worth, for her own selfish reasons. There is no “return to normalcy” where the Hatch Act is still a thing. There’s no reason for one party to follow the Hatch Act when the other party has proven that it won’t when it is in power. That would just be STUPID. As I said, the Hatch Act was an annoying anachronism anyway, why should my guys be hamstrung by it when the other guys are not?
The most dangerous thing about acting outside of the law is that you no longer have the law to protect you. We’re in the endgame now.
Trump Is Urged to Fire Kellyanne Conway for Hatch Act Violations [New York Times]