More evidence of how past merit system violations have hurt this state

As if we needed more evidence of how the blatant violations of Kentucky's merit system laws have hurt this state, we got plenty of it over the past couple of days.

Unfortunately for the Democrats, though, the violations occurred during their administrations but we are just now seeing the results.

No one who keeps up with Kentucky current events could have missed the news reports of widespread corruption and misdeeds within the Cabinet for Health and Family Services. After several complaints about the adoption and child removal procedures used by social workers based in the Elizabethtown-Lincoln Trail region and elsewhere, the cabinet's inspector general looked into the situation. The report, issued after a year-long investigation, was scathing, to say the least.

"What does this have to do with the merit system?" you may ask.

It has plenty to do with it, although you could never expect the state's Democrat-sympathizing media to explain it.

The two state cabinets with significant statewide presences are Transportation and Health and Family Services. These agencies have offices in each of Kentucky's 120 counties. Therefore, there are lots of jobs available in those offices that in the past, Democrats could use in their zeal to play patronage politics.

By whatever name or names it's been known by in the past, the Cabinet for Health and Family Services has been as much as a Democrat patronage playground as has Transportation. If you check the voter registration of employees in each office, you'll find the same kind of skewed numbers as Transportation displayed when the governor's merit system task force conducted research to document the long-standing assertion that under previous administrations, Democrats enjoyed significant advantages in employment decisions.

Much of the wrongdoing revealed in the E-town investigation was laid at the feet of supervisors. The supervisory level of employees within state government is even more overwhelmingly Democratic than the lower levels. In past years, you certainly didn't rise within the ranks in the state's merit system by being a Republican.

The names of the employees involved haven't been made public, but we'd be willing to bet the price of a 30-second Super Bowl ad that the vast majority of them are Democrats, who owe their jobs to powerful party leaders in their home counties.

As we have documented here previously, the second and lesser-publicized purpose of the special grand jury that investigated the Fletcher administration's hiring practices was to check into welfare fraud and embezzlement by state employees. That phase of the probe didn't get the attention of the merit system review, for two reasons. The first reason was because Ernie Fletcher couldn't be embarassed by any revelations of misconduct by longtime merit employees. The second reason was that exposure of those employees as dishonest criminals would reflect poorly on the press' beloved Democrats and the patronage system that hired them in the first place.

So now we have more evidence that during the past administrations of governors like Patton, Jones, Wilkinson, Collins, Brown, Carroll and Ford, these Democrats ran patronage systems that resulted in criminals being hired into state merit jobs. The county Democrat organizations have had just as much influence in hiring CHFS employees as they have KYTC workers, and once again the incompetence and dishonesty of these people has embarrassed the state.

Ernie Fletcher campaigned on a theme of cleaning up the mess in state government, knowing full well that much of that mess was the fault of the Democrats and the merit employees who got their jobs through the Dems' patronage system. Yet his efforts to clean up that mess and ferret out real criminal behavior resulted in a politically-motivated prosecution (persecution) of his own administration.

Even as Democrats continue to assert that the merit system worked exactly as designed until the Republicans got to town, the facts continue to prove them wrong and to show that the Democrats' blatant, systematic and pervasive violations and their patronage-based employment practices have caused real harm to Kentucky and its residents.