Drain the Swamp or Swim With The Alligators?
On the campaign trail Trump proclaimed his administration would foster the strength to ‘Drain the Swamp!’. Exactly what that means was anyone’s guess, but to his followers it assuredly meant he would remove the long standing establishment politicians from office and positions of power. Which sounds on the surface like a fantastic idea, partisan politics aside. The first murmurs of how exactly he would go about that came just a few weeks ago when news began to detail exactly who was in the Trump transition team.
NPR published a great article November 16th titled ‘From Lobbyists to Loyalists, See Who’s On Donald Trump’s Transition Team’. They did a great job detailing just who would be representing the American people in Washington. I won’t rewrite the entire article here (you can follow the link if you want to read a thorough list) but I will just list off a few peculiar picks:
- Cindy Hayden —A lobbyist for a giant tobacco company.
- Ronald Burgess — Served under the Bush administration as deputy director of national intelligence.
- Ken Blackwell — A senior fellow at the conservative Family Research Council and a career politician in various forms since 1979.
- Mike McKenna — President of a lobbying firm.
- Steve Hart — Chairman of a different lobbying firm than Mike.
- Jim Carter — A lobbyist from Emerson.
- Bill Chatfield — A lobbyist formerly nominated as director of Selective Service under Bush administration.
- Michael Catanzaro — Partner at lobbying firm CGCN, clients include Koch Industries.
- Martin Whimer — Chairman of yet another lobbying firm.
- And more!
Kevin Siers from the CharlotteObserver knows what’s up.
Now, whether you are a Conservative or a Democrat or something else entirely, you would be hard pressed to call that ‘Draining the Swamp’. Unless you were trying to make a pun on the cliche of getting out of the pot and in to the fire. Draining the Swamp and wrestling with the alligators? I’m not sure that works, but I digress. This is the start of the new Trump administration and it should rightfully terrify anyone who’s reasonably paying attention. But that’s just the transition team.
Today our Republican controlled House voted to hobble the Independent Ethics Office. Let that sink in for a second.
So the way things worked for the last several years is the House Ethics Committee would receive independent investigation review briefs on congressional misconduct from the Independent Ethics Office. With that information, the House Ethics Committee (ran by the House of Represenatives) would then file it’s own investigation. If it didn’t agree with the Independent Ethics Office review, the information would be published for the public to read. If it did agree, it would then pursue action. Historically, the House Ethics Committee has been very reluctant to take any action. The Independent Ethics Office had no power to pursue action on it’s own, but it acted a checks and balances to ensure the House Ethics Committee wasn’t ignoring backhanded deals within it’s own party by guaranteeing the information would get published regardless if action was taken. So what changes?
The Republicans are moving to create an Office of Congressional Complaint Review, ran directly by the House Ethics Committee to replace the Independent Ethics committee. Yes you read that right. The very congress that needs a committee to ensure it’s ethical will be running it’s own ethics committee without any independent oversight or review. That’s like a 3 year old agreeing to put itself in time out when it does something wrong.
This is on the eve of the Republicans gaining control of both houses of Congress. If this is the first move of the new congress, we can expect some pay per view level of excitement as they get settled in. Drain the Swamp indeed.
A while ago I wrote about what the average American should do in the wake up Hillary vs Trump, two of America’s worst liked candidates in history. What I’m trying to figure out now, is what the average American should do going forward. I don’t have an answer for that, but what I do know is that for better or for worse — and it definitely appears to be for worse — this wild circus ride is just getting started and the bolts are rattling loose just as we begin gaining momentum.
Update July 31st, 2017 — Originally posted January 3rd, 2017
On the topic of Swimming with the alligators, it would seem a certain Rex Tillerson might see some heat from his time as ExxonMobil CEO. At the very least, ExxonMobil is. I wonder how many others have ties with Russia at this point…
