For New Congress: Impeachment, Voting Rights, Ethics

      To impeach or not to impeach: that is the question now that the House of Representatives' Democratic majority and any conscientious Republicans are in a position to exercise that constitutional remedy for an abusive president. Impeachment hearings would suck a lot of political air out of Capitol Hill cloakrooms, but Democrats can and should pursue a progressive and reform-minded policy agenda at the same time.
      The House Judiciary Committee, under the chairmanship of Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., may be best advised to await the final report from special counsel Robert Mueller before broaching the issue. In the meantime, however, the committee could open hearings on the omnibus voting rights and ethics bill, introduced symbolically as H.R. 1 by Rep. John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat and hero of the great voting rights movement of the 1960s.
      The committee could also join with other House panels by looking into the ambitious agenda for rule of law and ethics reform that the Brennan Center for Justice unveiled in October under the auspices of a bipartisan task force. The 60-page report, replete with 30 pages of footnotes, includes more than two dozen proposals to prevent White House interference with Justice Department investigations and strengthen ethics requirements and official accountability.
      In an alternate political universe, the voting rights and ethics reform proposals would gain bipartisan support from Democrats and Republicans alike. In present-day Washington, however, any of these democracy-enhancing proposals would face a steep uphill fight in the Republican-controlled Senate after hypothetical approval by the Democratic-controlled House.
      Lewis, arrested and beaten as he participated in the voting rights march at Selma, Alabama, in 1965, was joined by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a dozen other Democrats in unveiling the voting rights bill from the House floor on Friday [Jan. 4]. The 571-page bill includes provisions, among others, to require automatic voter registration for federal elections, expand early voting, and limit the kind of aggressive cancellation of registered voters seen in Lewis's home state in the run-up to the hotly contested gubernatorial race in November.
      Republican Brian Kemp, running for governor while serving conflicted as the state elections chief, won that election by besting Democrat Stacey Abrams with a margin of 55,000 votes out of 3.9 million cast. Lewis said he is convinced that the results in Georgia and its neighbor state Florida were changed by "the way votes were not counted and purged" in both states. "That must never happen again in our country," he said.
      Voting rights need not be a partisan issue, but Republicans have turned it into a political background over the past two decades after concluding that steps to increase voter registration and participation help Democrats and hurt Republicans. They masquerade this partisan imperative with utterly bogus claims of rampant voter fraud that independent election law experts uniformly reject.
      The ethics reforms proposed by the Brennan Center, the New York University Law School think tank established as a living memorial to the late Supreme Court justice, are likewise not inherently partisan. Indeed, several fit well within the "drain the swamp" mantra mouthed by Donald Trump while a candidate and then forgotten in the White House, such as tightening financial disclosure requirements and strengthening the enforcement powers of the Office of Government Ethics.
      Other proposals, however, are aimed directly at positions that Trump took as candidate and continues to defend as president. The eight-member task force, co-chaired by former U.S. attorney Preet Bharara and the former Republican governor and Cabinet member Christine Whitman, proposed, for example, that Congress pass a law requiring all candidates for president and vice president to disclose their personal and business income tax returns.
      Trump broke with a 40-year-old precedent in refusing to disclose his income tax returns and, despite vague assurances of eventual disclosure, has continued to shield those returns as president. Transparency advocates in Congress, however, are being urged to invoke congressional oversight powers to demand the returns from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
      The task force also recommended that Congress pass legislation to enforce the Constitution's Foreign and Domestic Emoluments Clauses, the provisions that prohibit the president or other federal officials from profiting in their positions through payments from foreign or state governments. Trump currently faces three lawsuits for his notorious violations of these two clauses, but the strongest of three — brought by the District of Columbia and the state of Maryland — was put on hold after the judge approved subpoenas for Trump Organization business records.
      In addition, the task force called for Congress to eliminate the ethics exemption for presidents and vice presidents and require divestment of any personal holdings unless placed in a blind trust. As candidate, Trump made a big show of turning his businesses over to his sons, but he continues to have an interest in the businesses while refusing to disclose the details.
      These issues are more than enough for Congress to work on without taking on impeachment however urgent that issue. Despite her locker-room language, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the newly elected Democrat from Michigan, was right to point in an op-ed in USA Today to the "overwhelming evidence" that Trump has committed such impeachable offenses as obstructing justice, violating the Emoluments Clause, and conspiring to illegally influence the 2016 election. Mueller's final report on those questions may be too much even for the craven Republicans on Capitol Hill to ignore.