Bureaucracy, Party Building, and Patronage

In discussing bureacuracy, I noted how political parties attemptto use government for building and keeping political majorities.

We discussed how the Democrats' New Deal Coalition created numerous jobs for people who tended then to support Democratic policies and candidates. Federal Workers are known to e more sympathetic to Democrats than to Republicans.

In the same manner, Republicans are more interested in privatization of services (since the service will be provided by a company -- and business tends to support Republicans; perhaps you saw the famous incident recently of Barbara Bush donating money to Katrina Relief on the condition that it be used to buy software from a company run by her son Neil
Yes, she gets a tax deduction for that.

The creation of Homeland Security Department in 2003 involved a political battle involving the parties and their constituencies. President Bush initially resisted the creation of DHS: as a conservative, he did not want another federal bureacuracy. But also, as a Republican, he did not want more Democratic federal workers. So when it became clear in 2002 that the Senate was going to go ahead with a bill, Mr. Bush could not afford to be portrayed as not caring about Homeland Security.

The result was his own bill, that in the name of flexibility, gutted workers civil service protections. The Democrats in the senate balked, and Mr. Bush successfully used that in the fall senate campaigns to take the senate back for Republicans. In early 2003, the bill Bush wanted was law.

But the political battle did not end: as reported in today's Washington Post, the civil service rule suspension has been battled over for several years:

Congress set up the Homeland Security Department in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and the Bush administration has made "flexibility" a buzz word to justify weakening the clout of unions at the department. But such phrases as "flexible and contemporary" have not fared well against the established rules that govern binding contracts and collective bargaining.

Unions, led by the National Treasury Employees Union, have argued that Homeland Security went far beyond what Congress intended in revamping labor rules and persuaded a U.S. District Court judge to block the department's plan. The unions contend the department's changes would nix contracts, take topics for negotiation off the bargaining table and rely on an in-house board, beholden to the homeland security secretary, to resolve labor disputes.

Symbolic politics: while the real battle is over constituents and party building, the public battle is over "homeland security": in a race for Senate in 2002, Incumbent Max Cleland waqs defeated by challenger Saxby Chambliss:

Cleland had sided with fellow Democrats by insisting that workers' civil-service protections be retained. Chambliss even ran a TV ad picturing Cleland with Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.