The Holman Rule Once Allowed Congress to Purge Leftists From Government Agencies - Now It's Back
The effects could be far-reaching.
FEBRUARY 6-13, 2017, ISSUE
YESTERDAY 9:30 AM
By Patricia J. Williams
Patricia J. Williams is the James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia University School of Law and a columnist for The Nation.
On January 3, the House of Representatives passed a little-remarked funding package with an insidious provision. It reinstates the so-called Holman Rule and gives any legislator the power to amend fiscal appropriations so as to reduce the salary of certain federal employees to $1. In other words, it allows members of Congress to get rid of individual civil servants who are not to their taste.
First proposed in 1876 by Representative William Steele Holman (D-IN), the provision’s original object was to curb corruption among customs officials. Today, the rule has strayed far from its original purpose, instead giving Republicans another tool with which to “starve the beast” and enforce political conformity. Its reincarnation does not grant the power to fire outright, as the original Holman Rule did, but it does allow civil-service salaries to be reduced to $1 at the whim of legislators. Representative Morgan Griffith (R-VA), who spearheaded the rule’s revival, rebuffed the notion that it could be used to fire federal employees en masse. According to The Washington Post, he “favors a strategic application, likening it to a bullet from a sniper rifle rather than a shotgun.” Griffith deemed it unlikely that Congress would “go crazy” with such cuts, but “I can’t tell you it won’t happen…. The power is there. But isn’t that appropriate? Who runs this country, the people of the United States or the people on the people’s payroll?”
History can be a remarkable echo chamber: Griffith’s language is very similar to earlier defenses of the Holman Rule. A 1943 instantiation of the rule was used to justify the proposed elimination of the salaries of thousands of federal employees targeted for being too leftist. The pressure to retrench those salaries was fueled by secret investigations led by Representative John Kerr (D-NC), who summed up the issue as follows: “Whether or not the people of this country want men who are not in sympathy with the institutions of this country to run it…these people under investigation have no property rights in these offices.”
It was in response to those clandestine investigations that Representative Martin Dies, chair of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, proposed an appropriations bill defunding the salaries of 39 employees whom he denounced as “irresponsible, unrepresentative, crackpot, radical bureaucrats” whose associations included “Communist front organizations.” Dies’s appropriations bill became law.
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-holman-rule-once-allowed-congress-to-purge-leftists-from-government-agencies-now-its-back/
