The Trump administration and the November election may seem to be receding in the rearview mirror, but the many vulnerabilities that Trump exploited to undermine our democracy are still very much with us.
He brought those problems into sharper focus, but they’ve been there for years.
We must act now, if we are to prevent future election crises and ethical disasters in government.
Our elections and governing systems are not in the clear simply because Trump is no longer president. Indeed, far from it.
We cannot wait until 2022, 2024 or beyond and just hope things get better.
There’s much work to do. What should we prioritize? Here are a few areas I believe we can focus on:
To start, the new Biden administration and the new Congress must prioritize ethics. They must ensure that the many ethics norms and laws that have been eroded over time—and especially during the Trump administration—are restored and strengthened.
Literally in the middle of his last night in office, Trump went back on his promises of restricting Trump appointees from working for foreign governments after leaving office, and other restrictions on Trump appointees, and undid them all.
Without strong and lasting ethics reform, presidents, members of Congress and executive branch officials will continue to misuse public office for private gain well into the future, regardless of who’s in power.
To address ethics issues, CLC has joined a nonpartisan coalition, Open the Government, in calling on the Biden administration to implement an agenda of robust ethics reforms. The Biden administration’s newly announced ethics policies are a good start, but they will need the force of law to bind future administrations. CLC is therefore advocating for the passage of the For the People Act (H.R. 1/S. 1), which, among other things, would codify the ethics pledge for senior executive branch officials. CLC’s ethics program will also continue to watchdog and advocate for ethical government this year, with particular focus on congressional ethics, which needs attention.
Additionally, Trump led a dangerous effort to overturn the results of a free and fair election, a first for a sitting president in modern American history.
Fortunately, we can take steps to decrease the potency of such anti-democratic efforts in the future. Two weeks ago, CLC, working in collaboration with its partners at the National Task Force on Election Crises (of which CLC is a founding member and key contributor), issued a series of priority reforms that should be made to improve election administration and modernize the process by which we count electoral votes.
The Task Force report makes numerous recommendations, ranging from sustaining and expanding early voting and mail-in voting, to recruiting poll workers on an ongoing basis, to reforming state certification processes.
One of the recommendations in the Task Force report that I believe is of paramount importance is the reform of the Electoral Count Act.
As I wrote with Harvard Law professor and CLC board member Charles Fried in The New York Times earlier this month, the 1887 Electoral Count Act is a clear and present danger to democracy. The Act's flaws provided cover for baseless congressional objections on Jan. 6.
At a minimum, this process should be reformed to guarantee that the popular vote in each state controls the ultimate allocation of that state’s electors.
By prioritizing these areas, we can more directly prevent the kinds of crises we saw during the Trump years. However, numerous other long-term problems remain—including barriers to voting, partisan gerrymandering, unlimited secret spending in elections, poor enforcement of our campaign finance laws and much more.
CLC will continue to advance solutions to these problems. The For the People Act (H.R. 1/S. 1) is one solution, and CLC is advocating for it right now. I plan to write more about the For the People Act in the coming weeks.
We have work to do. We’re looking forward to getting it done—in order to advance a transparent, accountable and inclusive democracy for all.
The nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center advances democracy through law at the federal, state and local levels, fighting for every American’s rights to responsive government and a fair opportunity to participate in and affect the democratic process.
