The good news? Four U.S. senators have finally noticed the MSPB and how it is a willing and enthusiastic "get out of jail free" card for the butchers and passive murderers at the VA. The bad news? They sent them a polite letter instead of calling down fire from heaven to consume them utterly:
“On behalf of our nation’s veterans who deserve better, we request analysis of the principles, laws, and regulations guiding the MSPB decision-making process in these cases,” said a March 2nd letter to Merit Systems Protection Board Chairman Susan Tsui Grundmann from Senators John McCain and [Jeff] Flake of Arizona; Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin; and Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas. “Furthermore, we request details as to what steps the MSPB is taking to ensure that these types of incidents do not happen again.”
The letter specifically referenced the MSPB’s recent decisions to reverse the VA’s demotions of senior executives Diana Rubens and Kimberly Graves, whom the [commissaria]t has reinstated to their jobs as director of the Veterans Benefits Administration’s Philadelphia office, and director of VBA’s St. Paul, Minnesota, regional office, respectively.
We're to take from this, I'm assuming, that the senators' letter does not mention Linda Weiss, the Albany, New York, VA poobah who oversaw workers who left veterans unattended, stole drugs intended for the patients and, in multiple cases, gave morphine to veterans with treatable conditions, hastening their deaths; or Barbara Temeck, the head of the Cincinnati VA who served as her boss's wife's drug pusher, stole hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars by double-paying herself with a second job title she never performed, and ran a "hospital" so filthy that over eighteen hundred veterans were exposed to the HIV virus. And all they're "requesting" - not demanding - is that the MSPB come up with a bland, BS pile of mendatious bloviations.
I'm hoping that's just the opening ante, although I don't know why there's any reason not to cut to the defunding chase - other than that the MSPB is (tada!) an "independent" agency, which in practice makes it independent of congressional review, which is, of course, unconstitutional. Almost obligatorily so.
That probably explains the MSPB's haughtily amused reaction:
[MSPB Chairman Susan Tsui] Grundmann said in a February interview with Government Executive that some of the public comments made about the MSPB’s role in adjudicating those appeals were “disappointing” and “vitriolic,” adding that “MSPB judges do not put veterans’ lives at risk.” The MSPB sides with the agency in about roughly 90% of the cases that it receives from employees who appeal adverse personnel decisions against them.
Two bald-faced lies offered in the utter, entirely justified confidence that she will never, EVER be called to account for them.
A polite letter is staring at a pebble, hoping to magically develop telekinesis, when the task is to tear down the Himalaya mountain range. Even nuclear carpet-bombing wouldn't succeed, but can't McCain, Flake, Johnson, and Moran do any better than this?
STOP THE REAPPOINTMENT AND/OR EXTENSION OF THE APPOINTMENT OF MSPB CHAIR SUSAN TSUI GRUNDMANN. SHE ONLY HIRES AND CONTINUES TO EMPLOY TWO TYPES OF MSPB JUDGES, THOSE WHO RULE IN FAVOR OF THE U.S. GOV'T 100% OF THE TIME OR NEARLY 100% OF THE TIME. IT'S TIME TO CHOP TSUI GRUNDMAN FROM THE GOV'T PAYROLL! IT'S TIME TO IDICT, FINE, DISBAR AND JAIL SUSAN TSUI GRUNDMAN FOR FAILING TO PERFORM THE DUTIES OF HER JOB CONSISTENT WITH THE LAWS AND VALUES OF THE U.S.
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