It plays into the right wing's claims that experts are useless, which has led us to the shitshow we're in now.
Markwayne Mullin has proven that he's a good plumber -- he inherited his dad's plumbing business, and he grew it and sold it for a profit. He also has an Associate's degree in construction technology.
Meanwhile, the last serious head of DHS was Alejandro Mayorkas. Here's his resume before getting the job:
He graduated from UC Berkeley in history with honors, subsequently earning his J.D. from Loyola Marymount University. After law school, Mayorkas worked as an assistant United States attorney and as the United States attorney for the Central District of California in Los Angeles from 1998 to 2001.
In 2009, Mayorkas was a member of the presidential transition team for Barack Obama, leading the team responsible for the U.S. Department of Justice's Criminal Division. He was appointed by President Obama as the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. As USCIS director, Mayorkas implemented the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) process in 60 days.
He led U.S. government efforts to rescue orphaned children following the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and led the advancement of a crime victims unit that, for the first time, made it possible for the agency to issue the statutory maximum number of visas to victims of crime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alejandro_MayorkasHere's the thing: if Alejandro Mayorkas tried to do Markwayne Mullin's job for a day, he'd be laughed out of town. He's not a plumber, he's not trained as a plumber, so why on earth would anyone take him seriously if he showed up and tried to be a plumber?
But if Markwayne Mullin is appointed to do Alejandro Mayorkas's job, for some reason, the general cultural opinion seems to be that we should treat it as serious business, because we don't want to offend people with our "elitism."
It doesn't make sense to me. Good plumbers are experts. So are heads of the Department of Homeland Security. It doesn't mean that they're qualified to do each other's jobs.
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