United States Quotes
… open, competitive examinations for testing the fitness of applicants for the public service now classified or to be classified hereunder. Such examinations shall be practical in their character, and so far as may be shall relate to those matters which will fairly test the relative capacity and fitness of the persons examined to discharge the duties of the service into which they seek to be appointed.
This law established the Civil Service Commission and for the first time in American History required open examinations for the appointing of government employees. Japan had required examinations for civil service for hundreds of years. President Garfield had called for such legislation in his inaugural address {586804} 2 years earlier. This was the legislation that implemented it.
United States, Civil Service Act, 1883
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
At the time, Civil Service jobs were all appointed and the government employees could be fired at will regardless of whether the did their jobs well or not. The President and the Cabinet members spent huge amounts of time dealing with people looking for appointments (“place”)
and hearing complaints from civil servants who had been fired unjustly. Two years later, Congress passed the legislation. See 1.
The George W. Bush administration, violated the Civil Service Law and the traditions of the Justice Department by making hiring and assignment decisions on the basis of political ideology and participation. Making the situation worse, the political people who were put in senior positions of authority were often not very well qualified and far less so than the people they ended up supervising and outranking. The inspector general of the Justice Department, after being stonewalled, finally uncovered the mess and Monica Goodling, one of the worst offenders, was barred from ever working for the Justice Department again.
While the George W. Bush administration polarized the civil service by appointing ideological zealots without regard to competence and qualifications, Conservative Australian Prime Minister John Howard, had actually done the same thing before him.
This quotation illustrates another political advancement instituted by Queen Victoria. In this case it was Merit Appointments which were almost unheard of. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, was notorious for his crony appointments and the use of appointments to gain political support for himself. (He was good at it and became prime minister 4 years later.0 However, under the Queen’s constant insistence and pressure, merit began to be the major factor in selection and appointments. Ironically, even in the United States, diplomats though often very qualified, are one of the last vestiges of patronage appointments with many ambassadorships going to campaign contributors.
In a Senate confirmation hearing for Alfred S. Regnery as the director of the Justice Department's Office of Juvenile Delinquency, the nominee admitted that he had no direct experience in the field and couldn't name a single work he had ever read on the subject of juvenile delinquency. Senator Metzenbaum said:
This is an important quotation because it was believed by most of the Founding Fathers and the American public until relatively recently. Presidential candidates would not think of publicly campaigning. The view was that anyone who was ambitious for power and authority should not be trusted with it. The idea was first stated by Plato and has been a major view of Western politics since. Many still believe it, but no one has come up with a practical alternative in a large jurisdiction where there is no way to know about the possible candidates without their initiative. Earlier American presidential candidates, although they did not campaign as we know it, got associates to do their campaigning for them. At Presidential nominating conventions, candidates would not even attend. Abraham Lincoln for example never attended the convention at which he got nominated, but he had associates lining up delagates and he was managing their efforts behind the scenes.
The hearings were on indecency in broadcasting.
This is but another example of term limits in early America.
The United States of America (USA), commonly referred to as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country composed of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, and various possessions. The 48 contiguous states and federal district are in central North America between Canada and Mexico, with the state of Alaska in the northwestern part of North America and the state of Hawaii comprising an archipelago in the mid-Pacific. The territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. At 3.8 million square miles (9.8 million km2) and with over 324 million people, the United States is the world's third largest country by total area (and fourth largest by land area) and the third most populous. It is one of the world's most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, the product of large-scale immigration from many other countries.
