JD Vance's 'Constitutional Crisis' in the Making

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

63% : OPM, he told me, had "done a great job with the rule" by synthesizing and consolidating the preexisting legal authority that makes clear that Trump and Vance cannot simply fire tens of thousands of career employees and politicize the entire federal government by fiat.
48% : OPM's rule bolstering job protections for career employees, which was initiated last September, would take priority over any effort by Trump to reinstate the policy by executive order.
45% : In other words, there could be hundreds -- potentially thousands -- of fact-specific legal cases brought by federal employees to contest their reclassification and removal by Trump and Vance given their particular job functions.
45% : (Of course, that may be a feature not a bug for some conservatives, who would be delighted to see EPA or the Labor Department ground to a halt.)
44% : The conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court has proved more than willing to contort itself to achieve Republican goals, so there's no reason to assume any legal challenge to such a policy would result in a clash between Trump and the court.
43% : It is "very, very tough" for a federal agency to rescind and replace a rule issued through the typical notice-and-comment process, Warren observed, though it would at least theoretically be doable over time if Trump were to retake office and direct his OPM to do so.
43% : Whether they actually help Trump win back the presidency, however, is a decidedly open question.
41% : "What Trump is trying to do is create a sort of authoritarian type of government where he can manipulate the civil service system to do what he wants," said Kenneth Warren, a professor at St. Louis University whose areas of expertise include administrative law and the administrative state.
41% : "We know that courts can rationalize anything," Warren told me, "as they just did in [overruling Chevron] or in Trump v. United States," which granted Trump partial immunity from criminal prosecution over his alleged effort to steal the 2020 election.
39% : On this view, the court is far less likely to give deference to Trump or his OPM's interpretation of the statute.
38% : Despite the objectively dubious legal merits of Schedule F, this Supreme Court might very well sign off on it if Trump is elected and pushes some version of it again in a second administration.
33% : These sorts of antics may ingratiate him to Trump and the Republican hard-liners.
29% : The odds of a major standoff between Trump and the Supreme Court in a second term -- something that never really happened in the first term even before Trump made all three of his appointments -- seem low, to put it mildly.
28% : If Trump is reelected and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito resign during his term, Trump could end up appointing an outright majority of the court.
25% : Most provocatively, Vance has suggested in a series of interviews this year that Trump should defy the Supreme Court if the justices invalidated the effort.
24% : Trump first tried to implement Schedule F during his final months in office through an executive order, but he lost the election and the policy never took hold.
19% : Vance's proposal for Trump to simply defy the Supreme Court if it threw out Schedule F is also deeply concerning.
14% : This is a key part of the "deep state" that Trump and Vance want to eradicate; Schedule F would convert these workers into political appointees who could then be summarily fired by the president and replaced with partisans loyal only to Trump.

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