By Thomas G. MoukawsherShareNewsweek is a Trust Project memberAre Americans ready to see the danger from President Donald Trump’s Golden Age of Corruption? Will anger over affordability lead to anger over corruption?
Maybe we will realize that a more honest government could more honestly address the need for decent jobs, housing and health care.
Four things might help. Let’s start with the biggest. Americans should demand that Congress propose an amendment to the Constitution to allow us to fill government offices by election rather than by auction. Money has always powered politics, but in an age dominated by billionaires it has now swallowed our political system entirely, thanks to the Supreme Court 2010 decision in the Citizens United case.
...The court said that the First Amendment to the Constitution prevented government from capping political spending by rich donors and organizations. In the 2024 presidential election, dubious donors spent a record $2.7 billion. A constitutional amendment would allow us to replace privately purchased elections with publicly financed campaigns.
A close second change we need to fight corruption should be reform of congressional districts. Americans should be ashamed that politicians can choose their voters by gerrymandering rather than by voters choose their elected officials at the polls. Congressional districts must have roughly the same number of people in them, but current law allows state legislatures to make the shape of a congressional district into anything they want.
Today computers can make those districts yield a winner from whatever party they want. Texas and California are now competing to rig congressional elections in their states with a Donald Trump initiated race-based line drawing in Texas struck down by a lower court only to be temporarily resuscitated by an order from Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. Whether by legislation or amendment, this insult to democracy must end.
And democracy must thrive. It has only thrived so long in America because of our system of checks and balances. Each branch is given powers that the other branches aren’t supposed to use. Congress passes laws, courts interpret them and the president carries them out. Congress says what to spend on. The president spends it. But not today. With the connivance of Congress, President Trump has been stealing congressional power about taxing, spending and the use of military force to punish his enemies at universities, to extort foreign governments and to kill people on the high seas with impunity.
Our Constitution should make it clear. No branch may willingly give its powers away to another branch. State governors and congressional leaders should have the right to go to court to stop the kind of slippage going on today, before it’s too late.
Next, with the Supreme Court having gutted it, the independence of the Justice Department should be enshrined in the Constitution. Some people wonder: “If Trump is so corrupt why hasn’t anyone arrested him?” The answer is easy. Trump is the police now. He controls the FBI through a cartoon character named Kash Patel. Trump is also the public prosecutor. He controls federal prosecutors through a brazen partisan named Pam Bondi.
Honest FBI agents and prosecutors have been fired in droves, and Trump has personally ordered the indictment of his enemies while refusing any investigation of his fleecing of businesses, foreign governments, the media and people rich enough to buy pardons from him. Trump’s Golden Age of Corruption has now yielded him billions in exchange for things like promising F-35s to the Saudis and an open-ended military commitment to Qatar. And just this last week, Swiss businessmen literally handed him gold, and he promptly reduced tariffs of Swiss goods from 39 percent to 15 percent. An independent Justice Department is needed to curb this corruption.
What are the chances of any of this happening? At some point during or immediately after the Trump administration, public outrage about corruption should become even greater than it was after the Watergate scandal brought down President Richard Nixon in 1974. A wave of reforms followed Nixon, including the depoliticization of the Justice Department. With the Supreme Court gutting many of those reforms to presidential powers, there should be an appetite for a package of reforms—some for the Constitution and some for Congress. America’s leaders should be ready to act on them when that moment comes or lose their chance—possibly forever.
Thomas G. Moukawsher is a former Connecticut complex litigation judge and a former co-chair of the American Bar Association Committee on Employee Benefits. He is the author of the book, The Common Flaw: Needless Complexity in the Courts and 50 Ways to Reduce It.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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