John Thune has become a punching bag for good reason but there is a more insidious force at play nobody can talk about. Let me explain…
The staffers in Thune’s office have been asking Trump Naval and Maritime appointees questions about me before confirmation hearings.
I doubt John Thune knows who I am. His staff absolutely does. They track me. They hate me. And they will quietly bleed pushing out any appointee I’m friends with.
Someone close to PPO told me a Trump staffer commented that “Konrad should be a HBS case study on someone every in the administration respects but has zero chance of any appointment.”
It’s probably because I’ve called out congressional staffers numerous times before.
This is how Congress actually works.
It’s always the staffers. When we first floated the SHIPS Act, Mike Johnson’s hometown delegation were strong supporters.
The minute he became Speaker, his hometown people got bulldozed by the Speaker of the House staff he inherited.
Same man, different staff, different priorities.
Why do you think they wanted Mitch McConnell propped up after the freezing episodes? It wasn’t McConnell.
It was the cartel of people on his staff who needed his chair filled by someone they already controlled.
Members can’t read their own bills anymore. Thirty years of capped staff, frozen pay, and brain drain to K Street has left rank and file senators functionally illiterate on the legislation they vote on.
Leadership staff fill the vacuum. They are not entrenched because they are corrupt. They are entrenched because nobody else in the building can move a 1,500-page must-pass bill through conference.
That is the cartel. And it has rules. If you want anything in the NDAA, the omnibus, the CR, or any vehicle that actually moves, you do not piss them off. You do not name them. Break either rule and you do not get a second omnibus.
I’m not even willing to name individual staff.
John Phelan is the case study nobody is reading correctly. Phelan was not fired because he was a bad secretary. Phelan was fired because his chief of staff Jon Harrison had deep knowledge of the pentagon that Phelan lacked. Without him, Phelan was walking around the Pentagon naked and he knew it. He pulled back from media events and became too cautious.
Then there is Susie Wiles. I don’t know her. Never met her. From everything I can piece together she is doing a great job. The point is not Susie. The point is the Vanity Fair article.
It’s not even the article itself, that article contained a lot of BS, it was the reaction that came after. Every single republican & a few democrats stood behind her.
Now contrast that with the flood of negative articles about Mike Waltz, Kristi Noem or Pam Bondi.
When a politician is the subject of a hut piece is dragged over the coals, the system shrugs. But when it’s a senior staffer, the system closes rank. It is safer to trash Trump in print than to be perceived as trashing Susie. Trump is used to it. Susie controls the schedule, the access, and the door.
Multiply Susie by every leadership chief of staff, every NDAA conference staffer, & you have the machine. It is not partisan. Schumer’s staff & Thune’s staff protect each other from outside critics more reliably than they protect their own bosses from each other.
Leaders come and go but leadership staff is entrenched.
Congress is broken because leadership staff on both sides want it to remain broken. A Congress that can only legislate through 2,000-page must-pass bill is a Congress where the staff who draft the bill run the country. Regular order is their extinction event. They will never let it come back voluntarily.
You can call out politicians all day. They are used to it. Call out the staff and you don’t get frozen out of one bill. You get frozen out of every bill, by every office, on both sides, for as long as the cartel decides to remember your name.
They remember mine. Now you know why. even Luna can’t call them out.
For everyone in the comments calling me a coward for not naming names: I don’t know them.
My sources won’t say. They tell me “Thune’s staff.” When I press for names, they refuse.
And even if I got the name of the person doing the asking about me, is that the head of the snake or just an expendable junior staffer running an errand?
The majority office is a black box.
Someone in there knows how power gets organized and distributed. That someone isn’t me.
Is there one person in charge behind the scenes? A cabal? Or do they take their marching orders from someone on K Street?
I don’t know.
People like this are called “the blob” for a reason.
I’m not even sure John Thune knows for certain. It’s not the staff he built as a senator. It’s the one he inherited from Mitch McConnell.
What I do know, with absolute certainty, is that they are the reason nothing we want is getting passed.
To answer the most common question in the comments:
Yes, Thune can fire staffers.
But their friends will retaliate.
If one party banned together to fire all their staff you’d still have their friends on the other side ready to retaliate.
It’s kinda like mutual assured destruction game theory.
And they never would have let Thune become majority leader if they seriously feared he’d clean house.
Yes. Not much changes...
The Mezzanine level in any bureaucracy...
“Staff cartels” are the permanent, unelected insiders who treat the legislative machinery like their own protected fiefdom.
They thrive on complexity, punish whistleblowers or reformers, and operate as a shadow power structure that elected officials can’t easily challenge. Leaders come and go. The cartel stays. They often don't even agree with their bosses.
One hopeful sign is that they are misreading the room; the situation has shifted, yet they fight like it is still the past.
President Trump is a master of many things, and one of them is disintermediation; reaching down through the bureaucracy to find talent, bypass channels, and get things done.
You have a contribution to make.
We all do, so keep the faith, Patriot!
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