In his State of the Union speech this week Donald Trump asked Congress to give him the power to purge cabinet agencies. He said:

"Tonight I call on the Congress to empower every Cabinet secretary with the authority to reward good workers and to remove federal employees who undermine the public trust or fail the American people."

In other words, Donald Trump is saying, "I would like Ryan Zinke over at Interior to be able to fire the government employees who are standing up for our public lands, I would like Scott Pruitt over at the EPA to be able to fire anybody who works for the Environmental Protection Agency who's really working to protect the environment. We'll replace them all with toadies provided to us by Monsanto and the big chemical companies - Koch Industries, ExxonMobil. They've got a lot of people that they'd be glad to stock the EPA with."

That's essentially what he was saying. Now, congressman Mark Pocan said on the show that he thought that this was maybe an effort to destroy the unions that represent federal employees, because he had seen Scott Walker do that with state employees in the state of Wisconsin, because the federal employees unions will go to bat for people who are arbitrarily fired.

And I think that would be a twofer, but I think the real big issue here is how you run a government. He was asking Congress to undo laws that have been passed over literally the last hundred years or more - this is not some recent unionization thing.

-Thom

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