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The point of the federal ethics law known as the Hatch Act is relatively straightforward: Executive branch officials, whose salaries are paid by taxpayers, should avoid intervening in partisan politics. The law is designed to build a wall between official and political duties — and those walls have prevented abuses for decades.
As regular readers might recall, Donald Trump and his White House team simply obliterated the wall and decided that the rules didn’t apply to them. In fact, in 2021, the Office of Special Counsel identified 13 senior White House officials who effectively treated the Hatch Act like a punchline. Some aides freely admitted that they simply didn’t care about the law.
There were no meaningful consequences — it was up to Trump to hold his team accountable when confronted with evidence of lapses, and that obviously wasn’t going to happen — but the evidence was a reminder about the Republican operation’s indifference to ethical limits.
It was against this backdrop that, in a bit of a surprise, the Biden White House faced a similar finding. NBC News reported last week:
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre violated a law intended to prevent federal employees from using their offices to influence elections when she repeatedly referred to “mega MAGA Republicans” in the run-up to the 2022 midterms, a government watchdog agency said. In a letter first shared with NBC News, the Office of Special Counsel determined that Jean-Pierre’s choice of words in referring to Republican candidates violated the Hatch Act.
“Because Ms. Jean‐Pierre made the statements while acting in her official capacity, she violated the Hatch Act prohibition against using her official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election,” Ana Galindo‐Marrone, who leads the agency’s Hatch Act Unit, wrote.
I’m all for consistency. I marveled at Team Trump’s wholesale indifference to the Hatch Act during the Republican’s tenure, so it’s tough to argue that it doesn’t matter when Team Biden runs afoul of the same ethics law.
But I’m also mindful of the relevance of context and details.
The Trump White House, for example, brazenly turned officials into political operatives. Richard Painter, who served as the chief White House ethics lawyer in the Bush/Cheney White House, described Team Trump’s transgressions as “disgusting” and “unprecedented in the history of the Hatch Act.” Painter added that the entire Trump administration, at the most senior levels, was “devoted to illegally using federal offices to promote the president’s political campaign.”
In contrast, Karine Jean-Pierre referred to “mega MAGA Republicans,” effectively describing a contingent with a major political party.
Those aren’t exactly equivalent violations.
USA Today reported last week, “The White House is continuing to use the term ‘MAGA’ to label Republican opposition despite a federal watchdog agency’s warning that the language is a violation of the Hatch Act.”
Look, I care about ethics laws, and I believe they should be followed. I also care about common sense: If Trump and his allies routinely make references to “MAGA” as if it were a proper political movement within the Republican Party, is it really an ethics violation if White House officials do the same thing?