HuffPost: House Democrats Say Their Reform Bill Would Solve The Trump Administration’s Ethics Nightmare
HuffPost: House Democrats Say Their Reform Bill Would Solve The Trump Administration’s Ethics Nightmare
President Donald Trump has presided over one of the most unethical administrations in recent memory, and new laws are needed to stop it from happening again, ethics experts told Congress on Wednesday.
Trump set the tone for the ethical quagmire of his administration from the day he won the 2016 presidential election. His transition team ignored ethics officials and refused to abide by any ethics guidelines. He waved away anti-nepotism laws in elevating his daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, to positions of power with no relevant experience. He attracted aides who could not pass security clearance background checks. And most important, he refused to divest from his multibillion-dollar real estate business, allowing foreign governments, lobbyists and corporations seeking government action to directly pay the president. …
This situation upended decades of thinking about presidential ethics. It necessitates the enactment of stricter laws governing the executive branch, according to the ethics experts testifying at a Wednesday hearing on executive ethics provisions in H.R. 1, House Democrats’ top priority government reform bill.
“While every presidential administration in our history has had its ethical challenges, we’ve never seen so many corruption scandals and appalling lack of concern for the ethics rules that should govern our executive branch than with this administration,” said Karen Hobert Flynn, the president of the nonpartisan reform group Common Cause.