On rules

So, this is a thing I’ve been thinking about a lot. We all talk a lot of big games about corruption, “bought” public figures, sell-outs, lobbyists, money in politics, and the like. But what I see precious little of is any suggestion of what the new rules should be to root out those things. There seems to be a persistent belief, really amongst both conservatives and leftists, that if you simply put non-corrupt people in power, it all will magically dissipate. Hence why conservative activists can listen to yells to “drain the swamp” without seeing the shallowness of a complete lack of any attempt whatsoever to address problems of corruption, any reforms to the public service, anything. Because, to them, it’s not about rooting out corruption, it is about having someone *on their side* shaming people they *personally don’t like*.

But I’m not really hear to rag on conservatives, though the Trump era makes that simple. I’m here to talk about what changes to laws, procedure and practices should be made to deal with corrupt practices. Without new processes to hold leaders accountable, any yelling about “corruption” is a dead leader, no matter how saintly your leader is. So, below is a non-exhaustive list of the things that your sweetiepoo thinks contribute to our broken, corrupt culture of politics:

1. The worst is our general, total state of dysfunction with unearned veto points. It isn’t even close to enough that something has the support of two congressional committees, the full house, the full senate, and the President, it needs the approval of the leaders of both houses to even reach a vote in those houses, and it has to pass through a filibuster in the senate. The most basic of reforms would say that you should at least streamline that some, because at any of those points, typically the least public one, interests can step in and block issues from taking the floor, and you can run into crap like McConnell’s categorical blocking of judicial appointments during the Obama adminstration (btw, you could kill both the “it takes too long for anything to go through the courts” and the “Trump and McConnell have illegitimately stolen the federal judiciary” birds with one stone — create new federal judgeships equal in number to the pending nominations Obama had on Jan 20, 2017.)
2. Similarly, the revolving door crap has to end. A simple ban on any sort of paid work doing political advocacy or lobbying for anyone who has been at a high level of government is just common sense. If that “reduces the quality of people running for office”, I scoff at you. There are legions of exceptional goddamned people working in obscurity without the hope or desire for a high-paying management consulting or lobbyist job. One could also argue that this is hard to define, but a working definition could come
3. People who make decisions about the economy should not be allowed to hold stocks or run businesses. All personal assets should be mandatorily put into a blind trust, by any high official, be they high level executive agents, the President, Congressmen, or Supreme Court Justices
4. Any direct dispute between congress and the executive should be in the original jurisdiction of the supreme court and entitled to a speedy decision. The court system is not a way to filibuster arbitrary executive actions until any court decision on them becomes moot.

There are many more other ideas that one could propose. But it’s lazy and dumb to yell about corruption and abuse of power, or to expect it to just go away when someone you like is around. There have to be actual, real rules to constrain behavior, and real consequences when the rules are broken, or it’s all just talk. I don’t have the answers, but I do know that we collectively need to be thinking about the answers.