Reforming the presidency won’t be easy
Unlike Nixon during Watergate, Trump retains strong support among Republicans.
WASHINGTON — Three months after Richard M. Nixon became the first president to resign his office, Democrats netted 49 new House seats in the November 1974 congressional election, a tidal wave that opened the way for a burst of post- Watergate reforms.
New limits on campaign contributions, the Ethics in Government Act, the Presidential Records Act, the creation of a legal framework for special prosecutors — all these and more burst out of Congress between 1974 and 1978. Not all those laws succeeded, but many of their provisions continue to set limits on elected officials more than four decades later.
Democrats and some former Republicans hoped for a similarly sweeping election victory this year, believing that President Trump‘ s abuses of power required a congressional response as far- reaching as the one that followed Watergate. But voters had something else in mind — Trump lost decisively to Joe Biden, but Republicans gained seats in the House and largely held their own in the Senate.
The election didn’t eliminate the chance for new laws designed to prevent a future president from repeating what Trump did: Privately, some Republican members of Congress agree that he badly abused his power and opened a path that a future president could take to even more seriously damage American democracy.
But the election did significantly lengthen the odds on major reforms.
By contrast with Trump, Nixon served as a moderately popular president during much of his tenure. Many Democrats loathed him, of course — a distaste that stretched back to his days as a red- baiting member of Congress in the 1940s and early 1950s — but after a very close election in 1968,
he had majority approval for most of his first term, according to Gallup’s data, and won a landslide reelection in 1972.
Nixon’s standing with Americans dropped below 50% for good only when his top aides, H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, resigned at the end of April 1973. When the drop came, it was loss of support among voters of his own party that ultimately brought Nixon down. By the final six months of his tenure, barely half of Republicans still approved of his job performance.
Trump, by contrast, alone among presidents since scientific polling began, never had majority approval. His support never rose much above the mid- 40% range. But it never dropped much below that, either.
In this era of deeply entrenched partisanship, Trump’s backing within his own party seldom dropped below 90%. Combine that steadfastness with gerrymandered districts that give Republicans a notable advantage, and the GOP was able to come close to a majority in the House this year even though Democratic candidates, in aggregate, won substantially
more votes.
That support has survived Trump’s defeat. As he’s shown since he lost the election, his popularity with Republican voters has given him the power to suborn scores of Republican elected officials into actively backing his efforts to subvert the voters’ will, which have gone nowhere, but still harmed voters’ faith in American democracy.
The reality of partisan division means that nothing close to a national consensus exists on how to view Trump’s actions or which to consider abusive, let alone what the proper legislative responses might be.
That hasn’t stopped Democrats — and some former Republicans — from making the case for change. Their essential pitch is that the precedents Trump set could be used by a future president of either party set on abusing his authority. Now’s the time, they say, to act to put guardrails back in place.
“The whole course of events in the last few weeks just underscores that there’s a need” to restore broken norms of presidential behavior, argues Bob Bauer, the former White House counsel under President Obama and now a
senior advisor to Biden.
Trump failed to put many of his policies into effect and failed again in his effort to overturn the election. His frequent examples of “incompetence tend to limit the overall impact” of what he did manage to do, Bauer noted.
To gauge why reforms are needed, however, “you have to imagine what would the impact be if we had a president who was more adept” at translating his will into action.
Before the election, Bauer teamed up with Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor and former top Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration, to write a book, “After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency,” that details dozens of specific reforms that they advocate Congress and the new administration should adopt.
Those range from changes in how a presidential candidate runs for office, an enforceable requirement to disclose tax returns, for example; to conduct in office, such as new conflict- of- interest rules and steps to prevent retaliation against reporters; to measures that would affect a post- presidency.
They recommend, for example, that Congress amend federal law to say that a presidential effort to pardon himself would have no effect — a limit they believe courts would uphold despite the broad wording of the Constitution’s pardons clause.
House Democratic leaders, who consulted with Bauer and Goldsmith, have gathered together many of those ideas in a legislative package that Speaker Nancy Pelosi ( D- San Francisco) has said she hopes to bring to the f loor early in the new year.
Backers of the plan say Republicans should support the legislation in the knowledge that a Democratic president could strong- arm Congress using the same tools that Trump employed.
“Republicans are not going to want a Biden administration to say, ‘ We’re going to just ignore your subpoenas’ ” the way Trump’s White House did, said Rep. Adam Schiff ( DBurbank), one of the principal authors of the Democratic bill.
Schiff is under no illusion, however, that Republicans are ready to take that advice. At least for now, he said, Republican members of Congress will be “wary of taking any legislative action that will look like criticism of Trump.”
The same entrenched partisanship that sustained Trump through four chaotic years will now probably impede efforts in Congress to repair the damage he did.
Even so, Goldsmith said, the debate is worth having. Eventually, the partisan deadlock will shift. The post- Trump repair job may take longer than the one that followed Watergate, but eventually the country will be ready to move on.
“The context here is much different” from in the aftermath of Watergate, but “we still think a lot of these proposals are ripe” for action, he said.
“It’s really hard to predict the extent to which Trump will have a grip on the party” for the long term and whether “a return to the norms will remain viewed as an attack on him.”
In the long run, he said, “I’m not pessimistic” on the prospects.