A Familiar Story

 

This has become a familiar story: Because Trump was so unethical, so corrupt and so unrestrained by any notion of propriety or shame, we have to keep coming up with new rules to prevent future officials from doing what he did in areas where no rule had seemed necessary before.

We didn’t think we needed legislation such as this, because we always assumed every president, no matter their party or ideology, had a baseline of respect for the office they occupied, the laws that bound them and their obligations to the country.

 

The latest Trump revelations should prompt more talk of reform

By Greg Sargent

 and 

Paul Waldman

 

September 7, 2022 at 5:53 p.m. EDT

 

As more revelations emerge about documents that Donald Trump hoarded at Mar-a-Lago, the political debate is centered on what should and will happen to the former president himself. The Post heightened the urgency of such questions with its latest scoop that one of the documents described “a foreign government’s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities.” 

But this whole controversy raises another set of questions: What should we do to prevent this in the future? Even (or especially) if Trump manages to skate away from accountability with the intercession of some friendly judges, is there a way to stop a future president from doing this all over again?

As it happens, there is already legislation in Congress that could do a lot in this regard. Introduced by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.), the Promoting Accountability and Security in Transition Act would clarify and update the rules around preservation of presidential records and what occurs during a presidential transition.

Among other things, the bill would give the National Archives much greater oversight of the president’s compliance with existing laws in the treatment of presidential documents (which Trump routinely violated). It would create new standards for the presidential transition to ensure that records are maintained and involve the archives much more directly in that process. 

“This legislation is all about creating much clearer and more enforceable standards on the appropriate retention of documents,” Murphy told us, adding that, “We need clear rules with real consequences.”

Murphy originally introduced this bill in late 2020, when many feared Trump would merely destroy documents. At that point, no one dreamed of the scenario that did unfold — i.e., Trump hoarding boxes and boxes of documents, including ones containing highly classified national security secrets, and rebuffing months of efforts to retrieve them by the National Archives and FBI.

So Murphy says the bill will need revision in light of the full range of misconduct by Trump — which is still to be determined — to make it more focused on how to prevent the theft and hoarding of documents.

“Trump is challenging our imaginations when it comes to the ways a president can abuse power on the way out of office,” Murphy told us. The senator hopes for a vote on such legislation this year, but he isn’t optimistic that it will happen.

Murphy allows that such a law probably wouldn’t have dissuaded Trump. But Murphy points out that it would require much more coordination between the White House, the archives and Congress with regard to presidential documents as a presidency ends.

That alone could potentially mean misdeeds might be identified by other institutional players earlier in the process, Murphy argued. He added that his bill would have consequences, such as denying funding for post-presidential salaries and staff.

This has become a familiar story: Because Trump was so unethical, so corrupt and so unrestrained by any notion of propriety or shame, we have to keep coming up with new rules to prevent future officials from doing what he did in areas where no rule had seemed necessary before.

We didn’t think we needed legislation such as this, because we always assumed every president, no matter their party or ideology, had a baseline of respect for the office they occupied, the laws that bound them and their obligations to the country.

And Trump has revealed gaping holes in our system that badly need reform on numerous fronts. In some cases, House Democrats have stepped up: Late last year, they passed the Protecting our Democracy Act, a package of measures that strengthened congressional subpoenas of the executive branch, enhanced oversight of potential presidential manipulation of the Justice Department and required presidential candidates to release tax returns, among other things.

Those reforms were responses to various degradations Trump inflicted as president. Yet almost no House Republicans voted for it, and it could not pass the Senate over a GOP filibuster.

Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of senators is still negotiating reforms to the Electoral Count Act of 1887, again to plug holes that Trump sought to exploit while attempting to overturn his 2020 loss. Those may yet pass, but that’s not certain.

The bottom line is that, viewed in light of the vulnerabilities in our system Trump exposed, Congress’s efforts at reform — because of GOP opposition and the refusal of a handful of Democratic senators to reform the filibuster — are falling woefully short.

After Watergate similarly revealed a series of huge holes in the system vulnerable to corrupt exploitation, Congress passed a broad range of reforms in response. Nothing close to that appears to be happening this time, and that is unlikely to change no matter how jarring the latest Trump revelations become.