Trump undermines Watergate laws in massive shift of ethics system [View all]
Congress built a system 50 years ago to prevent another Nixon. Trump seems determined to dismantle those rules.
By Naftali Bendavid
Then-Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman was 32 when, as a member of the House Judiciary Committee, she voted in 1974 for three articles of impeachment against President Richard M. Nixon. She spent the next few years as part of a Congress that passed wave after wave of laws to rein in future presidents.
A half-century later, Holtzman, a New York Democrat, is watching as President Donald Trump takes aim at post-Watergate reforms on transparency, spending, conflicts of interest and more. By challenging and disregarding, in letter or in spirit, this slew of 1970s laws, Trump is essentially closing the 50-year post-Watergate chapter of American history — and ushering in a new era of shaky guardrails and blurred separation of powers.
“We didn’t envision this,” Holtzman said. “We saw Nixon doing it, but he hadn’t done it on this vast a scale. Trump is saying, ‘Congress cannot tell me what to do about anything.’”
https://wapo.st/4eavWMJ
The GOP congress refuses to do anything about this. SCOTUS for the most part is on the take, so they enable Trump also.
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