Sure, but if that's very leveragable control, isn't "hire conservative faculty members who are protected from future changes in the political winds by tenure" better than "make all faculty easier to fire"?
You have vastly more power in society by being able to remove your political enemies, than by being able to appoint your friends.
There's a lot of ways in which the latter can screw up - your friends might turn out to be less pliable than you wanted, someone might have been appointed who turned out to be a trojan horse, someone might have been appointed who was palatable to your goals a decade ago, but is now causing trouble, someone might have been appointed under your opponent's watch, etc, etc.
When you instead hang a sword of Damocles over their collective necks, they have no choice but to toe the party line.
"Hold onto power at all costs" is a strategy, sure, but the gotcha here seems to be that they won't be able to remove existing enemies.
It's only new hires who will be affected.
So "hire your political friends" is still important, since they can do some damage before you have a chance to fire them, even given you having additional leverage (and you can imagine a certain kind of academic who could ride that publicity to a lucrative position).
I guess the difference between my thinking here and the Texas GOP's is that I'm saying "make sure your friend are around even when you're not in power anymore" and they're thinking "we will be in power forever."
