Far from being drained, the Washington Swamp at the beginning of 2019 seems swampier than ever: In the last year, Cabinet secretaries have resigned under clouds of corruption, sitting members of Congress have been indicted, and outgoing lawmakers waited mere hours after leaving office to ink lucrative lobbying contracts.
That’s why the new Democratic majority in the U.S. House has introduced, as its first order of business, a bill that proposes a sweeping range of reforms to the political system, from curbing campaign spending to banning lawmakers from serving on corporate boards. Entitled the For the People Act — or simply called “H.R. 1” in legislative-ese to denote its primacy in the majority’s agenda — the bill is being branded as nothing less than the cure for a broken democracy.
You’d think that in the current climate, an ambitious anti-corruption campaign on Capitol Hill would break through the noise and earn a warm reception from an American public that, per a 2015 Gallup poll, overwhelmingly believes that Congress is corrupt, out of touch, and beholden to special interests.
View the complete article by Sam Brodey on the MinnPost website here.