Of Coure the President can Reassign LTC Vindman

          On Friday, February 7th, the White House announced that LTC Alex Vindman, Ukraine analyst, on the National Security Staff, was escorted out of the White House, along with his twin brother, Yevgeny Vindman, also of the National Security Staff. Twitter has been on fire with this news. It accompanies the news that Ambassador Gordon Sondland, U.S. Ambassador to the Eurpean Union, was being removed from his post. The Vindmans are, of course, careerists, while Sondland is a political appointee. What do they have in common? Both Alex Vindmand and Sondland were subpeoned by the House of Representatives, and both testtified during the Trump Impeachment Inquiry.

          Despite the outrage, it is clearly a fact that any presdient has the authority to remove an ambassador. Any president has the authority to remove some member of his own National Security Staff. There really should not be a debate over that. Neither should there be a debate that serving officers in the military cannot protest the treatment of Alex Vindman. It is not gutless for serving officers to fail to speak up on Vindman's behalf. That said, retired and former officers certainly are within their rights to do that very thing. As a retired military officer, I am frankly appalled at the treatment that Alex Vindman has received, not only from the President, but from his apologists. As to Gordon Sondland, well, he was a man who covented an ambassacorship, and effectively paid for it with his contributions to the Trump inauguration.

     So the Vindmans will go back to other jobs in the bureaucracy, and Sondland will go back to being a hotel magnate in Seattle, and life will go on, right? Not quite. Let's leave aside the sheer harrassment, including death threats, that these three have faced. For the most part, the character assassination they have endured is inspried mostly by President Trump's propaganda ministers like Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh (ironicallyawarded the President Medal of Freedom last week in an over-the-top reality show version of the State of the Union Address). All three have been called traitors for this crime: appearing in response to a subpeona and stating facts under oath.

          The President's official press secretary, Stephanie Grishamn, said earlier in the week that "people should pay" for his ill-treatment at the hands of the House of Representatives. If you could stomach the President's remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast, and at his "victory lap" news conference later on Thursday, you  realize that these three are just the start. In fact, it was earlier announced that Ambassador Marie Yovanovitich, whom Trump had fired, retired from the Foreign Service. Ambassador William Taylor, picked by Trump to replace Yovanovitch in Ukraine, also quit as a U.S. Ambassador. He had already been called out of retirement to become Ambassador to Ukraine. Vice-President Pence's foreign policy aide, Jennifer Williams, is being reassigned.

          Political appointees in government can be removed for no cause whatsoever. I have no argument with that principle. What I do have an argument with is this: it is clear by now to anyone with half a brain that Trump is well on his way to politicizing all service to the United States. This includes civil service, the military, the intelligence agencies and the law enforcement agencies. We should remember that the Trump Administration fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe only hours before he could have officially retired.

          Government service, at least since 1883, and the passage of the Pendleton Civil Service Act, has had the principle: competency for service. The Pendleton Act certainly did not go into effect all at once, nor did it fully go into effect across all levels of government. We have a curious mix of careerists and political appointees at the federal government level, the dynamics of which Hugh Heclo described so well many decades ago in his book, Government of Strangers (1977). But what all are supposed to share is the idea that the oath of office is to the Constitution, not to the President.

          That President Trump went about setting up a backchannel effort in Ukraine to extort political favors from the neophyte Ukrainian President Zelensky is laughably obvious from the testimony we heard in the Impeachment Inquiry. Imagine if all the White House officials that the House subpeoned had actually been forced to testify. Alex Vindman, Gordon Sondland, and the others who did obey a legal subpeona, provided compelling evidence that something really stunk in the White House. Ambassador John Bolton, who called what Rudy Giuliani was doing in Ukraine a "drug deal" refused to testify. Apparently, the book royalties will be more lucrative, however, than John Bolton summoning up the courage to testify.

          In the military, it is commonplace to relieve officers of command when that officer's senior "loses confidence in his/her ability to lead." Thus, "firing" a commander is done with little to no due process. That said, it is explicitly forbidden to relieve an officer of command based on retribution. In fact, if a fired commander can make the case that they were relieved bceause of retribution, that would be grounds for relieving the senior officer. Naturally, proving retribution is a difficult thing to do.

          However, when the President's own press secretary stated ealier in the week that "people have to pay" for the entire Impeachment process, it is fairly easy to figure out that the Vindmans, as well as Sondland, were victims of such retribution. Trump's supporters would say, "So what?" From their standpoint, there is an argument, because now, at least, the President is all and in all. We have, apparently, finally crowned a "President-king," something the Antifederalists feared we would do eventually.  However, the "so what" is this--we compromise the ability of subordinates to do their Constitutional duty if the entire basis of their service is loyalty to the President. If the President does not want to hear bad news, then nobody will give him bad news. The only problem with that is that the security of the state is the issue, not the psychological insecurity of the man sitting in the Oval Office. Public service is a public trust...a public trust. When we conflate the public with one man, we degrade public service. It matters not whether one is a political appointee, a civil servant, or a commissioned officer. We all take the same oath, and that oath is not to support the President, it is to support the Constitution.