The Republican has never seen the likes of a Trump Presidency….
It has spotlighted some the faults we have in assuming the leader of a 300 million plus country will be ‘on the level’…
The NY Daily New has a piece when asks for several things to be put into place to prevent another Trump like shipwreck from occurring in the future…
None of the suggestions are likely to be acted on I’d think…
With media coverage….A serious discussion about them out in the open by lawmakers of BOTH parties should occur….
It’s now clear that Trump, many of his top campaign aides and his personal attorney went to great lengths to cover up multiple contacts and connections with the Russian government during the 2016 campaign at the same time Russia was actively interfering in the U.S. election.
What comes next will be ugly. Many, including the president and his cheerleading squad at Fox News, will defend his actions with a combination of bluff, bluster, “whataboutism” and personal insults.
Congress, led by the new Democratic majority in the House, will dig into Trump’s business dealings, and might begin holding televised impeachment proceedings. The Mueller investigation’s steady drip of damaging revelations could doom Trump’s 2020 re-election effort, or leave him too unpopular to pass significant legislation in a second term.
Some will celebrate the coming political cataclysm; others will mourn it. Either way, we’ll need to enact laws to prevent a repeat of the current confusion.
A bipartisan task force on democracy convened by the Brennan Center at NYU — co-chaired by former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara and ex-Gov. Christine Whitman — has begun clarifying what future presidential candidates should be required to disclose.
The panel supports passages of the Presidential Tax Transparency Act, which would require candidates to release three years worth of taxes. The group also suggests a national security review of the financial holdings of all incoming Presidents, vice presidents and cabinet members by the Office of Government Ethics and the director of national intelligence, to determine whether those entanglements pose a potential conflict or threat to American interests.
There’s also a recommendation that Congress should clarify exactly what kinds of foreign gifts and transactions violate the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which bans foreign gifts to Presidents that haven’t been approved by Congress.
One especially timely recommendation is that Congress enact laws to prevent the summary firing of special counsels like Robert Mueller.
“I’d like to think that reasonable people will be honest about Mueller,” Bharara said at a recent public discussion of the report, which I moderated. “Because it can’t be the case [that] the people who are at a certain level of power, whether it’s the President or his associates, can’t be investigated.”
Whitman agrees. “These issues are bigger than our party. They’re about our democracy, they’re about our country, they’re about what makes us a great country,” she told me. “This is not just about this administration, it is about institutionalizing that behavior that we think of as normal.”
In two years or four, the post-Trump era — and the trip back to normal — will begin. It’s not too soon to begin thinking about laws and policies that can prevent a re-occurrence of the conflicts of interest that followed Trump into the White House and now threaten to derail his presidency….
image…NewYorker