by the way, my position on executive firings hasn’t been law since the “Humphrey’s Estate” decision in the 1930′s, when the Supreme Court overturned a magnificent 1920′s decision by Chief Justice Taft, “Myers v. U.S.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers_v._United_States

When I rather noisily quit my merit system job over Knowles Administration corruption, both the Administration and various union leaders very publicly said that they’d make sure I never worked in Alaska again. They were very nearly successful with that for awhile, people in politics or working for the government would cross the street rather than be seen talking to me. Finally, the Republican controlled legislature started pitching me some scraps in the form of contracts to work for them. I’ll admit now that I really only planned for scraping by for the remaining two years of his term and I could not conceive of the SOB being re-elected. When he did get re-elected and I was facing another four years with no way to make a decent living in my field, things were getting grim.

Interestingly, by about half way through the second term, the Administration was so sick of their union friends and all the internal problems from what they’d done to the State’s HR/LR functions, they hired me back as a supervisor to fix the mess. After four years in the wilderness living off scraps, I’ll be the first to admit that I had mellowed some of my delicate sensibilities about the stuff they were doing.

(I must now leave my keyboard as I think I made myself nauseous typing that last sentence)

This is Democrat playbook since the Clinton days and they do it at the state level as well. An IG is pretty brazen since they do have explicit cause protection, but that really doesn’t seem to matter to them. As soon as they take office they set out to remove or intimidate into silence all the senior level career employees, the people who actually know and follow the rules and who make the government run. If they can’t get rid of them, they reassign them to doing nothing and give them an office with no windows or phone and a seat that flushes; you have to be really close to retirement to be able to stand that for long. It is really hard to come to work when nobody will dare be seen talking to you, you don’t have anything to do, you get jerked around by the boss, who you know is trying to provoke you into doing something stupid.

Once they get the experienced people out of the way, they replace or supplant them with either Democrat operatives or with very junior employees who don’t even know what they don’t know. Then there are no complaints from inside the workforce about who the money gets sent to, how the contract gets let, or who got hired for what. This is all combined with a PR campaign about how they’re cleaning up and streamlining. What they’re really doing is eliminating all the rules about money, people, and stuff so they’re free to do as they please. Then, the only thing they have to worry about is public opinion and since Democrats can count on good press and on the media never peeking under their skirts, they can do as they please without regard to those silly laws and things.