Donald Trump appears to have scored his first political victory as president, even before he has actually taken on the job. His thunderous disapproval is reported to have caused Republican legislators to abandon their plans to strip the key Office of Congressional Ethics of its independence.
The president-elect used 140 characters or less to tweet his condemnation of the controversial move. He demanded that the plan to emasculate the one non-partisan internal body able to call out lawmakers for misbehavior or wrongdoing be trashed. The proposal now seems unlikely to go forward to a vote. It was noted that Trump ended his tweet with the tag “#DTS” the initial letters of “Drain The Swamp” his key campaign promise to reform the political establishment on Capitol Hill.
This incident makes clear that the United States is probably about to experience a presidency like no other. Trump's continuing affection for using Twitter to launch thunderbolts at his opponents pushes the social media envelope further than most mainstream politicians have ever dared. And his contempt for the political correctness that echoes loudly around the cyber-halls of social media is often breathtaking.
But in truth, hardly less breathtaking was the decision of a small group of Republicans in the new Congress to cook up the effective demise of the one watchdog that can hold legislators to account. The OCE is not without its faults, but to have removed its independence, prevented it from acting on anonymous tip offs and placing its currently public investigations behind a curtain of secrecy would have been scandalous.
Yet lawmakers seem to have been blind to the appalling impression this proposal has made on the outside world. Not content with paralyzing government as a result of bitter political polarization, they seemed set on placing themselves beyond crucial public scrutiny. This is precisely the sort of featherbedding, coupled with contempt for the voters, that Trump exploited to win the White House. As such, there was no way that the president-elect could have avoided contesting this stunt. Republican lawmakers were either being extraordinarily foolish or disturbingly devious in proposing the murder of the OCE. If the latter, then it may have been a deliberate challenge to their new Republican president. With his own business empire, Trump himself has issues enough over transparency and conflicts of interest. If he had not protested the legislators’ plans to protect themselves from scrutiny, he would have damaged his own political position.
Trump needs a Republican-dominated Congress to back his new politics. But at the same time, he made some very big promises about clearing out the political and business swamps in Washington and Wall Street. If he starts an early war with the political establishment, his presidency could become paralyzed in the same way that the ineffective Obama succumbed to a bickering and mean-minded Congress even when, in his first two years, his fellow Democrats were dominant.
American voters sent Trump to the White House because they are sick of the current political caste. They chose a man outside politics to bring about change. Probably even Trump appreciates the enormity, even the impossibility, of this task. There are simply too many vested interests, too many billions at stake for meaningful reform. But at least in saving the OCE, he has begun to drain a small part of the swamp.
