Memo to Foggy Bottom: if you don’t like President Trump’s new immigration policies, take a hike:
State Department employees harboring anger about President Donald Trump’s travel ban are welcome to find a new place to work, the White House said Monday.
The 100 signatories of a dissent memo that’s circulating at State ‘should either get with the program or they can go,’ White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer declared. ‘At some point if they have a big problem with the policies that he’s instituting to keep the country safe, then that’s up to them to question whether or not they want to stay or not,’ Spicer told reporters during his daily briefing.
What a concept. For far too many years, government employees — with good reason! — have understood that while administrations may come and go, their jobs are more or less forever. So this bracing dose of reality is exactly what they need to hear.
The cable, posted to web by the blog Lawfare, argues that Trump’s executive order barring the State Department from issuing visas to citizens of Sudan, Iran, Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Libya will not achieve its stated purpose, to protect the country from terrorism.
It further points out that countries such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are not included in the order, even though citizens of those countries have committed acts of terrorism in the United States in the past. The executive action will ‘immediately’ sour relations with the countries affected and ‘much of the Muslim world, which sees the ban as religiously motivated,’ the dissenters write.
For decades, all we’ve heard out of Washington, under presidents of both parties, is Why Nothing Can Be Done. Good for Spicer for at least articulating the correct principle here: if you don’t like the policy, resign. Otherwise, the Trump administration can look forward to constant undermining and sapping for the next four years.
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