Hey, how's it going?

Good.

Little quiz for you.

Two words, Hatch Act.

What does that mean to you?

I've caught little bits of this in the news and this is some kind of rule or law that

means that a person in the executive can't use like their executive position to be running for office or

something like that is that close? Yeah that's pretty good that's pretty good so this has come up because of the Republican National Convention, of course.

And what we've seen already is the use of the White House for the Convention.

So the First Lady has given a speech there, and the President is about to give a speech on the

South Lawn of the White House.

So not only is this unprecedented for a modern president to use the White House in this way

It raises this idea of well aren't there laws about this kind of thing? So there is this thing called the Hatch Act. There are, but the answer is actually a bit complicated.

So the Hatch Act is a Depression-era law that says basically government employees can't participate in politically partisan activities when they're on the job.

I mean the motivation for the law I think is pretty clear like you don't want employees to be using the symbols of their job and then also advocating for

their own political beliefs or working for partisan political activities.

You know, while they're on the job only, they can do things when they're at home or off duty.

Presumably the president and the vice president are never really off duty so

how does it apply to them?

Ah, so here's the kicker.

So while you've heard a lot of things about the Hatch Act, the Hatch Act applies

to all of these federal employees except for the president and the vice president.

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