New York – A new bipartisan task force will tackle what its founders say is the erosion of governmental norms created by the election of President Donald Trump.
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Democratic former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara and Republican former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman announced the task force in an editorial published in USA Today , the pair said that since the election of President Donald Trump, they’ve seen a deep erosion of “the norms and boundaries traditionally guiding American political behavior.”
“A workable democracy can thrive only when there are basic rules, often unwritten, that curb abuse and guide policymakers,” they said. “It’s time to turn soft norms into hard law.”
The opinion piece cited Trump’s refusal to divorce himself from his business interests and what Bharara and Whitman said were the Republican president’s efforts to influence federal criminal investigations.
“All this shows just how easily a chief executive can ignore the unwritten rules that typically constrain presidents. We see similar erosion elsewhere in government, too. For example, a major tax bill, affecting the whole economy, enacted with no committee hearings,” they wrote.
The pair said the task force will be based at the Brennan Center for Justice, a policy institute at New York University’s School of Law.
They said it would review whether informal norms surrounding financial conflicts, political interference with law enforcement, the use of government data and science and the appointment of public officials should be codified into enforceable law.
Bharara is a frequent critic of Trump, who fired him last year as part of a purge of prosecutors appointed by President Barack Obama, a Democrat. Whitman was a former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator under Republican President George W. Bush and has criticized Trump’s environmental policies.
Online:
http://www.democracytaskforce.org/
Bahrara cant get over that he was fired so hes trying to be in the news. What a loser!
Great thats why we voted for the man. We are sick of norms.
And frankly if he gets a little richer due to his conflict of interests who cares as long as I get richer too.
We need commitee’s to study every bill till it gets killed and nothing gets done?
All the reasons to continue supporting Trump.
#MAGA
In the days following the 9/11 attacks, when the air in lower Manhattan was still filled with terrible chemicals, Christie Whitman — then the federal EPA administrator — assured us that the air was fine and it was okay for people to return to their homes in the area. As she admitted much later, she lied, to prevent panic.
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I thought she was smart enough to stay out of the public eye, but evidently I was wrong. Does she think people have forgotten how they put themselves in danger because they believed her lies?
It’s called drain the swamp silly . The norms are what keep the swamp stable.
Bharara is anything but normal!
Good luck to them. Civil society has become anything but civil in the last two years.
Hopefully this will be a truly bipartisan enterprise.
LOL, what a bunch of losers. They would rather have the US sink according to their “unwritten rules” than be restored to greatness under the leadership of a “boor” like Trump.
That’s why we need to drain the swamp!
Poor sore loser Preet who was fired by Trump, trying to take revenge….not nice.