Comment by naravara

The practice of resigning rather than follow illegal/immoral orders seems ill suited to operating in a context where the leadership is an active adversary and can instantly replace you with someone who will just do the thing. I feel like civil servants need to internalize that the old customary practices are based on a context where there are checks and balances in the system, as well as standards of decency and democratic accountability, that make these sorts of formal actions have teeth. When none of that exists a principled resignation is basically just saying “My principles make me a hurdle to your attempts at violating the Constitutional rights of the public, so let me just get out of the way so you can sprint towards that goal more easily.”

Obviously though, it’s the dirty hands problem. 99% of the time we don’t want civil servants to do this because 99% of the time the President isn’t actively trying to unmake the Constitutional order. It’s very problematic to have civil servants thinking their judgement should overrule their leadership, but we’re in extraordinary times and there is no leadership of an opposition movement that can coordinate to set any sort of guardrails around that kind of willful insubordination.