Dean Christakos« Not Blogging Like It's the End of the World | Main | Reflections on July 4th »
June 16, 2007
Best Defense Ever!
As a federal employee, I need to be wary sometimes of whether my actions violate the Hatch Act-- the law that prevents anyone from engaging in partisan political activity on federal property or using my position for political purposes. It's not really a big deal... I just don't forward any political e-mails to my friends, don't make any partisan suggestions to my coworkers about political races they might be interested in, and I don't make partisan political statements on the internet while I'm at work. I can't host fundraisers or solicit donations for political candidates at any time (interestingly, I can have my home used for fundraisers; I just can't be directly associated with the event. I know, it sounds stupid, but if I were married to someone in the private sector or if my roommate were in the private sector and either of them wanted to host a fundraiser where I lived, it would be legal, which is totally fair).
Anyway, this brings me to the case of Lurita Doan, director of the General Services Administration, the federal agency which is responsible for government procurement. She is currently under investigation for violating the Hatch Act because she held a meeting with federal employees on federal property where the deputy director of political affairs in Karl Rove's office gave a presentation about the 2006 midterm elections, specifically described which House seats were targets for 2008, and Doan started asking "How we can help our candidates" -- specifically how the office itself and her employees could be used to help the Republicans in 2006 and 2008. This is not cool. It is not the job of civil service employees to take partisan sides in elections or have our talents used for the specific purpose of helping politicians' campaigns. Ultimately, the way this took effect was that various federal agencies were used to time their announcements and new initiatives in specific congressional districts to coincide with the election cycle and government employees were present to engage in public events that were used to promote the candidacies of various politicians. This was not unique to the GSA.
That brings me to how Lurita Doan defended herself in public investigations of her behavior and possible lawbreaking. This is so awesome. While she was being investigated, she took issue with and threatened retaliation against employees who cooperated in the investigation into her possible law violations, saying
"Until extensive rehabilitation of their performance occurs, they will not be getting promoted and will not be getting bonuses or special awards or anything of that nature."Sounds pretty bad, actually. Not only is she accused of violating the Hatch Act, not she's caught threatening retaliation against anyone cooperating with the investigation against her. How does she defend herself? She said that this was not a threat or a statement of what would happen in the future, she said that she meant to use the hortatory subjunctive. Witness this truly awesome discussion of tense and mood in the House of Representatives:
Of course, as John Sarbanes (D-MD, Greek-American!) points out (don't mess with grammar with people who speak Greek), the hortatory subjunctive is usually translated as "Let us do something" -- exhorting people to take an action (which in Spanish, for example, is constructed using the first person plural imperative tense). She was probably trying to defend herself by saying that she meant to use the subjunctive in the sense of "Should extensive rehabilitation of their performance occur, they would be getting promoted." However, it was probably a Freudian slip that she inserted "hortatory" in there, because she wanted to exhort people not to promote them for cooperating with the investigation. She was, as Sarbanes pointed out, using the simple future tense to describe what will happen to those employees under her watch.
See also (referenced before): God save the subjunctive!
Posted by Dean at June 16, 2007 8:30 PM
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