Trump’s “Anything Goes” Ethics & A Real Reform Opportunity Begins In 2019

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FRED WERTHEIMER’S WEEKLY NOTE | December 20, 2018freadshot

“President Trump views the presidency as a vehicle for putting as much money as he can into his own pocket. And his ‘anything goes’ ethics has given us the most ethically-challenged administration in our times.”

House Democrats are getting ready to introduce a historic package of democracy reforms as H.R.1 at the beginning of the new Congress.

And this week, Senator Tom Udall (D-NM) announced that he would introduce the companion Senate version of the legislation, joined by Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and a number of his Senate Democratic colleagues.

House Democrats plan to pass the legislation early in the new Congress. Attention will then move to the Senate where the focus will be on building maximum support for the bill among Senators during the remainder of the Congress. The Senate in the next Congress will again be controlled by leading reform opponent Majority Leader McConnell. The democracy reforms will also be injected into the 2020 presidential and congressional elections.

Our goal is to enact the democracy reforms in 2021 under a more responsive President and Senate. If that does not happen, we will keep pressing for the reforms as long as it takes to fix our broken political system and corrupt campaign finance system.

The democracy reform legislation takes a holistic approach to solving a number of problems facing our democracy in one bill.

The bill addresses campaign finance, voting rights, redistricting, and government ethics problems. This unique approach is necessary because we have a unique set of dangerous problems facing our democracy that must be addressed.

We haven’t seen a corrupt campaign finance system like this since the Gilded Age and robber baron era. We haven’t seen voter suppression and barriers to voting like this since the poll tax era. We haven’t seen this kind of extreme partisan gerrymandering in modern times.

And we have never seen as unethical a President as the one we currently have.

President Trump views the presidency as a vehicle for putting as much money as he can into his own pocket. And his “anything goes” ethics has given us the most ethically-challenged administration in our times.

The public overwhelmingly wants these problems solved.

Opportunities to fix our political system and democracy do not come along often and when they do, like now, the moment must be seized. We, along with many others, intend to do so.

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Fred Wertheimer is the Founder and President of Democracy 21, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that works to strengthen our democracy and ensure the integrity and fairness of government decisions and elections. See previous Notes from Fred here.