The term “spoils system” is today practically synonymous with government corruption.
The former being the necessary antidote to the latter, an entrenched Deep State bureaucracy.
This from frontpagemag.com.
The first administration of Donald Trump demonstrated a bureaucracy determined to thwart the president at every turn is of genuine concern. Given what We the People have witnessed for the past nearly nine years, Conservatism must seriously reconsider the utilizing the spoils system.
NOTE: President Andrew Jackson began the use of the spoils system in the 1830s as a blow against corruption:
[T]o prevent the establishment of an entrenched bureaucracy that would oppose the president.
As Rating America’s Presidents explains:
[T]he spoils system prevailed for fifty years, but the election of James A. Garfield as president in 1880 was its death knell. Garfield was a champion of civil service reform; to mollify the Stalwarts, or Republicans who favored the spoils system, the vice-presidential nod went to Chester Alan Arthur, the man whom Garfield’s predecessor, Rutherford B. Hayes, had fired from his job as Collector of the Port of New York for ignoring Hayes’s civil service reform executive order forbidding forcing federal officers to make campaign contributions. No one was concerned about the disagreement between the running mates: Garfield was only forty-eight and in perfect health, and the Civil War, which led to the assassination of Lincoln, had been over for fifteen years.
Garfield had only been president for four months when, on July 2, 1881, he and Secretary of State James G. Blaine were walking through the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington, on their way to board a train to spend part of the summer in New Jersey, away from the heat of the capital. Just then, a man stepped up behind Garfield and fired his gun twice at the president, hitting him in the back and arm, and crying, ‘I am a Stalwart and now Arthur is President!’
That man was Charles Guiteau, who has been described in many history books as a “disappointed office seeker.” And undeniably, Guiteau was a “disappointed office seeker,” however, he long before the assassination most assuredly fallen under the spell of mental illness. His sister had recounted that in 1875, six years before the assassination, he had raised an axe to her with a look on his face “like a wild animal.”
She explained:
I had no doubt then of his insanity. He was losing his mind.
And in 1881, shortly before the assassination, Senator John Logan of Illinois had stated of Guiteau:
I must say I thought there was some derangement of his mental organization.
When Guiteau bought a pistol and hatched his plan to murder Garfield, he wrote:
The Lord inspired me to attempt to remove the President in preference to someone else, because I had the brains and the nerve to do the work.
The Lord always employs the best material to do His work.
The wounds he rendered to Garfield were not mortal, and the president lingered through the summer. This was, however, the age before sanitary practices were known to be necessary. And thus, on September 19, 1881, Garfield died of infections his doctors had given him while probing the wound.
Although Guiteau thought that by elevating Arthur to the presidency he was protecting the spoils system, his crime had the opposite effect:
[N]ational revulsion over the killing of Garfield made civil service reform the most pressing issue of the day. The time for that reform had come at last, even as the Stalwart Arthur took the oath of office.
When he became president, Arthur proceeded to shock the entire nation by supporting civil service reform. His determination that he had a responsibility to do what Garfield would have done outweighed his commitment to the Stalwarts.
He declared his support for civil service legislation, explaining:
[N]ot he, but Garfield, had been elected president, and that he consequently had a responsibility to carry out his policies.
Arthur demonstrated immense personal courage and honor in choosing to carry out the wishes of his slain predecessor rather than implement his own contrary agenda. His decision to do this effectively ended his political career, as he almost certainly knew it would, and yet he stood firm.
Whether Arthur’s stance was entirely wise in the long run is a separate question. Historians take for granted that civil service reform was good for the country, and there has been no significant indication that it was not until quite recently:
[Because] a president has been thwarted in numerous endeavors by an army of unelected bureaucrats within the various departments and agencies of the government, who are determined to impede his agenda in every way possible.
The proponents of civil service reform never envisioned a situation in which deeply entrenched opponents of a sitting president in the FBI, the Justice Department, and elsewhere would be determined to destroy the president—or at very least make it impossible for him to carry out his policies—and could not be removed from their jobs because of civil service regulations.
In theory—and most likely in practice too—government will work more smoothly and the executive branch be able to operate more effectively in the way the Founding Fathers envisioned it would:
[I]f the president were able to clear out the employees
of these agencies who oppose him and replace them
with people more in line with his vision.
Today, the spoils system has few defenders and has had few for over a century.
However, God speed President Trump in reenacting the beauty of the spoils system.
