The Right Issue. The Wrong Everything Else.

Let me start with what I actually believe, because it shapes everything that follows.

The most potent issue available to any non-incumbent in America right now is corruption. Pay-to-play. Government for sale. Some of it is blatant self-dealing — and you can run a lot of the everyday pocketbook stuff through that same lens, right down to data centers and the role of Big Tech.

But a lot of it is perfectly legal, and it’s an outrage anyway, because it’s just how Washington does business now. This town is more awash in cash, especially from tech and crypto, than it has ever been. I know that lands on the average voter with about as much shock as the sun rising in the east.

Still, this isn’t a Washington-invented narrative. Corruption has been showing up in focus groups **unprompted** this summer as campaigns message-test for the fall. Nobody has to tee it up. People bring it up on their own. Sometimes it’s the plane. Sometimes it’s the donors. Sometimes it’s the data centers, which they connect to the donors. Sometimes it’s crypto. Sometimes it’s the pardons, issued near-weekly and all seeming to come with a price tag. It’s not clear ALL of it has broken through with everybody. It does appear some of it has broken through to everybody.

Part of why is that there’s no subtlety to it. This isn’t Nixon. Nixon at least had the decency to be ashamed, to hide it, to build a plumbers unit in the dark. There’s no shame here. It’s in your face, every day, on the record.

So a coherent opposition party should be doing exactly what Chuck Schumer has started to do, which is build an anti-corruption agenda. He found the right issue. I want to say that clearly before I take apart what he did with it.

Because what he’s done with it is two bills in two weeks, and they’re a case study in a party that identified the correct problem and then reached for every tool except the one sitting in its own hand.

And if you’re wondering why you haven’t seen much about what’s actually in them — I’d guess it’s because the coverage was of the press releases. I’m not sure anyone bothered to read the text of these bills Schumer is proposing.

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## A word about where I’m coming from

I’ve spent a career telling people I cover politics as it is, not as it should be. It was a mantra I repeated quite a bit on Sundays over the last decade. I’m a pragmatist. History says we aren’t going to elect many saints — and for what it’s worth, I’d rather die with the sinners than suck up to the saints anyway. (Or so Billy Joel sort of sang once.)

But I don’t work for anybody else now. No corporation with its own regulatory exposure and its own worries about what the coverage looks like. Advocating for something as anodyne as cleaner government can be troublesome to what we peons call the powers that be. As a true independent, I can do both: cover politics as it is, and say plainly how it should be.

Here’s how it should be. The law’s job is not to produce saints. Saints do the right thing anyway; that’s what makes them saints, and that’s why there are so few. The law’s job is to make sure **sinners** find it in their own interest to behave. You build a system where honesty pays better than the alternative.

That’s the standard I’m holding these bills to. Not whether they’re righteous. Whether they’d change what a sinner decides to do on a Tuesday — and whether they’d work at all, which you’d think would be the first question a party leader asks about his own bill.

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## The credibility problem comes first

Before we get to the drafting, there’s a prior question: do Democrats have the standing to be the ones who clean this up?

I’d point them to a case study that’s been running in plain sight for two years, and it has a name. Sherrod Brown.

In 2024, Brown was chairman of the Senate Banking Committee and the most effective crypto skeptic in Congress. From that chair, he stonewalled the industry’s bills. So the industry went and got him. Fairshake — the super PAC network funded by Coinbase, Ripple, Andreessen Horowitz and others — put more than forty million dollars into beating him, more than four times what it spent on any other Senate race that cycle. Bernie Moreno won.

All of it legal. And here’s what makes it the cleanest example of the problem I’ve got.

The next August, at a blockchain conference in Wyoming, the man who took Brown’s gavel stood up in front of the industry and said thank you. Tim Scott, the new Banking chairman, told the room he was grateful to all of them for getting rid of Sherrod Brown, and added that the industry had literally put Bernie Moreno in the Senate. There’s video. You can hear the laughter and the applause.

Sit with that. A sitting committee chairman thanking an industry, out loud, for financing the removal of the guy who used to have his job — and treating it as a charming feature of how the Senate works now.

Nobody broke a law. That’s the whole point. That’s what people mean when they say the system is bought and paid for.

Now look at the message it sent. Brown is running again this year against Jon Husted, and he’s gone quiet. Asked about crypto, he says it’s part of America’s economy, and his goal is to make sure it lifts up Ohioans without putting them at risk. His campaign hasn’t answered many follow-ups about whether his positions actually changed. The ambiguity looks intentional, and it’s roughly where Schumer has been urging Democrats to land. The industry’s own scorecard still rates Brown strongly against them. Fairshake is sitting on somewhere between a hundred forty and a hundred seventy million dollars and won’t say whether it’s coming after him again — and industry allies have accused Schumer of maneuvering to keep that money on the sidelines. A Solana-backed PAC has already put eight million behind Husted.

That’s a deterrent working exactly as designed, on exactly the man it was designed for, in public, with nobody facing so much as a parking ticket.

And it reshaped the caucus. After 2024, the read among Democratic strategists was that Brown’s defeat was a warning shot. Schumer’s response was to push members to engage the industry rather than stonewall it — write the rules yourself instead of handing the issue to Republicans. That’s the call I’d expect from a leader whose job is holding seats. It was also a call made with a hundred forty million dollars sitting on the table. Or, more accurately, being held as a proverbial gun to his potential majority’s head.

Then came the test, and this is the part that matters.

In May of 2025, as the Trump family’s own crypto ventures came into view, Schumer told Democrats not to feel pressured to vote for the stablecoin bill until the conflicts were addressed. The procedural vote failed. He and Jeff Merkley introduced the End Crypto Corruption Act to bar elected officials from issuing or endorsing digital assets — naming the exact problem, with the exact fix.

And then the GENIUS Act passed anyway in June, 68 to 30, with eighteen Democrats crossing over. The conflicts language never made it in. Trump signed it in July.

So they diagnosed it correctly, drafted the remedy, held the leverage — Republicans needed Democratic votes — and let it go. The bill they wrote to stop a president from minting his own coins went nowhere, and the bill that didn’t stop him became law.

That’s the pattern. Hold onto it, because you’re about to see it twice more.

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## Exhibit A: The bureau Donald Trump appoints

Two weeks ago, Schumer rolled out the Anti-Corruption Bureau Creation Act at an event hosted by Public Citizen. A hundred and thirty-three pages. The pitch: fold the Federal Election Commission, the Office of Government Ethics, and the Office of Special Counsel — a broken patchwork of watchdogs, in his words — into one powerful agency, funded independently, modeled loosely on the Federal Reserve.

I read all hundred and thirty-three pages. Here’s Section 201, word for word:

> There is established **in the executive branch** the Anti-Corruption Bureau.

Seven members appointed by the President. A chairman the President picks.

Chuck Schumer’s big idea for confronting the most transactional presidency in American history is a board that Donald Trump gets to appoint. He rolled this out with a straight face.

That’s not a gotcha. That’s the text. If it passed tomorrow, that’s what would happen.

You can’t make it up.

Now, the obvious defense from the four Senate Democrats who sponsored it is that the board is independent — Trump can’t fire them. So here is the entire firing protection in this bill. All of it. Section 206(a) says that within five days of firing a member, the President has to send Congress a letter explaining why.

That’s it. He can fire all seven Tuesday morning as long as he writes a note by Friday. He could post: “Dear Congress, I’ve fired these folks because I think they’re corrupt. Thank you for your attention to this matter. DJT.” And voila — the board’s gone.

Part of me wanted to scream at the drafters and at the good government groups that endorsed this: did all of you have your memories wiped of the last eighteen months of rulings from this Supreme Court?

Except the bill itself acknowledges those rulings, so I can’t even claim ignorance. On June 29 — one month before this dropped — the Court decided *Trump v. Slaughter*, six to three, Roberts writing. Ninety years of precedent gone, and the President can now fire the heads of independent agencies whenever he likes. The lawyers who wrote this bill read that opinion. That’s precisely why there’s no job protection in it. They knew it wouldn’t hold up.

Which decides to park this thing in the executive branch is a total head-scratcher.

And then the press release went out calling the Bureau insulated from presidential interference. They knew it wasn’t. They said it anyway. That’s worse than not knowing.

Public Citizen hosted the rollout, and they weren’t alone. Common Cause, the Campaign Legal Center, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, and Protect Democracy all lent their names to it. I like these folks. I know a lot of the people who work at these organizations, and I’ve relied on their work for years. They genuinely want to clean up government.

But did the leaders of these groups actually read the legislation? Because I can’t imagine many of them would look at Section 206 and conclude this thing survives contact with the current Supreme Court. They’ve spent the last eighteen months warning that this President has captured the independent agencies. Then they stood behind a bill that hands him another one.

There’s a companion detail I can’t get past. One section says nobody in the entire federal government can cut this agency’s powers or shrink what it can do. Then it adds four words: “other than the Chair.” The one person the President picks. They built the trapdoor into their own floor.

And the bill ends up doing the opposite of what it promises. Right now, capturing all of federal ethics enforcement means capturing three agencies with three separate bosses. This bill merges them into one, makes that one agency the only place these laws can be enforced, and lets the President fire everybody running it. Three locks become one lock, and the key goes to the White House. Schumer’s own selling point — one agency instead of a broken patchwork — is the weakness.

Basically, this Schumer-proposed bill makes it easier and faster for Trump to neuter all of these ethics enforcement agencies.

I’ll give the bill two things, sincerely.

The findings are accurate and well-sourced on the laundry list of pay-to-play this administration has run. Nobody padded the case.

And buried around page eighty is a genuinely smart fix. Here’s the problem it solves. The FEC has six commissioners, three from each party, and it takes four votes to do anything. So on any case with a partisan edge — which is most of them — you get a 3-3 tie, and the case dies. The agency’s own lawyers can recommend an investigation and three commissioners simply say no. That’s been the pattern for fifteen years, which is why campaign finance law is now closer to a suggestion.

Schumer’s fix flips the default. When the agency’s top lawyer — a career staffer, not a political appointee — finds reason to believe somebody broke the law, that finding takes effect automatically. The commissioners get thirty days to overrule it, and it takes a majority to do that. Instead of nothing happening unless four commissioners agree, something happens unless four commissioners stop it. Deadlock stops killing cases. In a polarized town, that may be the design principle for all of this: make it take a majority to stop enforcement, not a majority to start it.

That’s about five pages, and it could move as its own amendment tomorrow. Which raises the obvious question: this same bill proposes to swallow the FEC anyway. Why not pass the fix first and see if the FEC works before you abolish it?

That’s the tell. **The best idea in the bill is a small amendment to a law that already exists. It’s buried under a hundred and twenty-eight pages of an agency Trump could neuter on day one.**

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## Exhibit B: Better, and still pointed at the executive branch

This week they came back with a second bill, on pardons. The No Payoffs for Pardons Act.

It’s better, and for reasons worth naming.

It doesn’t ask Trump to do anything. It puts the burden on the person *getting* the pardon — basically a financial disclosure form, the same kind a candidate for Congress files, requiring pardon recipients to report anything worth more than ten thousand dollars they gave to the President, his family, his library, his foundation, his inaugural committee, or his PACs. The findings work around the immunity ruling head-on: the President may be out of reach, but the people paying him aren’t. That’s smart drafting.

It amends laws that already exist instead of inventing something new. Fifteen pages instead of a hundred and thirty-three. And the trigger is neutral — the reporting window keys to whichever president granted the pardon, so it applies to all of them, forever.

Compare that to the first bill, which reaches back to January 20, 2025. Not a rolling window. Not neutral. Blatantly partisan. Now, that doesn’t make the Anti-Corruption Bureau Act unconstitutional — its actual rules apply to any president, not to Trump by name, and courts set that bar high. But it hands every future defendant a ready-made argument that the whole thing was personal, and lets the White House wave it off in a sentence. If you want the money back, you don’t gift-wrap that. If you want a headline, you do exactly what they did.

Now, the flaw in the pardons bill. Everything runs through the Attorney General. He writes the forms, builds the website, publishes the reports, investigates violations, brings every case.

Under a president who sells pardons, the Attorney General is his appointee.

And what’s funny — in the way that isn’t funny — is that five days earlier, the Anti-Corruption Bureau bill went out of its way to cut the Justice Department out of enforcement entirely, on the stated theory that DOJ can’t be trusted. Now DOJ gets everything.

I’ll be fair: this one’s harder to avoid. The Justice Department already sits inside the pardon process; the Pardon Attorney works there. You can’t write a pardon-disclosure law that pretends DOJ doesn’t exist. But you can put enforcement somewhere else, or let private citizens sue, or route it through the courts. They didn’t consider it, or they considered it and didn’t say so.

There’s a second problem, and it’s the one campaign lawyers will use to kill this. Section 4 sweeps in any *candidate* for federal office, treating them as a public official under the bribery law for anything they’d have power to do once elected. That’s an attempt to criminalize what is, in practice, the everyday business of politics. The courts have sided with candidates and campaigns almost every time this has been tried. How do you tell a donation from a favor from a bribe? It’s so subjective it’s very hard to write a law around — and under current rulings, close to impossible. That provision is the most likely to get stripped, and the bill doesn’t need it.

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## There’s a simpler idea, and it’s already sitting there

Here’s what makes all of this so frustrating, and why I’m tempted to call the whole process a clown show.

There’s a much cleaner answer on pardons; it’s already been introduced, and I’ve written about it before: a constitutional amendment giving Congress the power to cancel a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote. Twenty House members and five senators can force a review. Congress then has sixty days to override — same as a veto.

It’s airtight, because it’s an amendment. No court is going to tell you the Constitution is unconstitutional. It puts the decision where the Framers put every other check on the President. And it delivers what everybody claims to want from these bills, because a review means a hearing, a hearing means subpoenas, and subpoenas get you the documents on who gave what.

And it’s already bipartisan. Don Bacon has signed onto Johnny Olszewski’s version. A Republican is on the record. Remember, people on both sides of the aisle have hated pardons from both Trump and Biden — so there’s a real rationale for more members to sign on, whether you’re angry about Trump’s pardons or Biden’s preemptive pardons of his family and Fauci.

Why Senate Democrats aren’t sprinting toward this is beyond me.

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## What they already have

Here’s my near-weekly reminder of how our system is SUPPOSED to work. Congress doesn’t need to build anything. The Founders assumed Congress would do this work itself. So why isn’t it?

It has subpoenas. Jamie Raskin just used them on FIFA. Dave Min and Peter Welch have been using them on seventeen pardon recipients and the Pardon Attorney’s office. What Congress gave up is enforcement — the power to actually make somebody show up. That’s called inherent contempt; it hasn’t been used since 1935, and Congress could switch it back on with a rules change. No president’s signature required.

It has the spending power. One sentence in a spending bill: no federal money to any company the President or his family owns a piece of. Congress writes sentences like that all the time.

It has the emoluments clause, which makes Congress — not some bureau — the body that says yes or no to foreign money going to American officials. In two hundred thirty-seven years, Congress has never defined the term, never built a reporting system, never set a penalty.

It has disclosure. Most of the money flowing to presidential libraries, ballrooms, inaugural funds and political nonprofits doesn’t have to be reported to anyone. Fixing that is a six-page bill.

It has the conflict-of-interest law, which specifically exempts the President — an exemption Congress wrote and Congress can delete.

And there’s advice and consent, and impeachment.

Every one of those is Article One. Every one is gathering dust, or has been used so badly it may as well be (see impeachment 1.0).

The reason isn’t mysterious. Oversight costs something. Floor time, subpoena fights, and eventually the expensive part: going after a president of your own party, because someday it’ll be your guy. Creating an agency costs a press conference.

That’s the trade Congress has been making for two generations — war powers, emergency declarations, tariffs. Hand the power to the President, then spend forty years complaining about what he did with it. Has anyone up there gotten the message that the answer is to STOP HANDING MORE AUTHORITY TO THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH?

There’s one detail I keep coming back to. Go through the Anti-Corruption Bureau bill’s list of who it covers: the President, the Vice President, their spouses and adult children, the Cabinet, senior White House staff, the Justice Department, the CIA, the IRS, and every federal contractor in America.

Congress isn’t on it. Not one member. Not a spouse, not an adult child, not a senior staffer. No stock trading. A hundred and thirty-three pages about public corruption, written by senators, that doesn’t cover senators. Handed a blank page and able to write anything they wanted, they wrote themselves out of it. Where’s the accountability for a senator who takes gold bars from a foreign government? I sure hope that got left out for some reason other than not wanting to call out corruption on their own side of the aisle.

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## The bill for the sinners

So back to my standard. Would either of these change what a sinner decides on a Tuesday?

The first one, no — the sinner picks the referee. The second one, maybe at the margins, and only if the Attorney General is somebody’s idea of an honest broker. Which is the assumption the whole bill rides on, and the same assumption the first bill called absurd. And as I said up top, I live in the world of politics as it is: after the last eighteen months, should anybody expect an Attorney General appointed by Donald Trump to do the right thing on Trump’s pardons?

Senate Democrats have figured out the right issue. Their solutions have been terrible. Unimaginative is the kindest word for it. Maybe they’ve decided nobody believes Congress can do this anymore, so why campaign on Congress doing it?

But that’s the disease presenting itself as the cure.

Democrats are likely to have a very good November, and a big part of the reason is voters who are simply grossed out by how nakedly this administration has gone about its business. That disgust is a gift, and gifts like it don’t come along often.

Here’s where I keep landing. If what America wants is a housecleaning — if the country wants somebody to fumigate this town — I’m not sure either party can do it. Republicans forfeited the issue entirely with the olé they’ve waved at Trump for two years; there’s nothing left to defend. And the Democratic answer, from their leader in the Senate, is a bureau Donald Trump appoints and a disclosure system Donald Trump’s Attorney General enforces.

I want an honest government where checks and balances actually root this stuff out. These bills are so poorly thought through, and so disconnected from what we’re all watching happen, that there’s a scene from *A Few Good Men* I keep thinking about — the one where Tom Cruise, at the end of his rope, does a mock game show bit and announces the category as whether or not to follow the advice of the galactically stupid.

That’s about where I am.

The people who look at both parties and decide neither one is serious about this aren’t cynics. They’ve read the bills. They’re right.

I don’t think THIS version of the Democratic Party is remotely capable of cleaning up this town. The crypto experience alone is disqualifying. These two bills are a big part of why so many people have lost confidence in the party and especially its leadership. It may take a third party. It may take a truly independent president. Because what these bills show is that the leader of the Senate Democrats and his team either don’t know what powers Congress has, or have no interest in using them, and would rather ask the executive branch to do more.

Congress doesn’t need a new bureau to find out who’s writing the President fifty-million-dollar checks.

It needs to remember that it’s Congress and read the f*cking Constitution.