Debacle demands means of checking the president
By Jennifer Rubin
Feb. 2, 2020 at 10:00 a.m. EST
... Statutory penalties for contempt of Congress with swift review by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, tightening time limits for responding to Freedom of Information Act requests and enacting penalties for abuse, and reinforcement of whistleblower protections (and penalties for outing and retaliating against whistleblowers) must be considered. We need criminal statutes expressly barring solicitation of information from a foreign government for use in an election. All presidents and vice presidents must release their tax returns and place their business holdings in a blind trust.
Congress also must reclaim its powers. That entails repealing “emergency powers,” returning tariff power to Congress, requiring “acting” Cabinet secretaries be Senate-confirmed officials in the same department and limiting their tenure to 60 days, beefing up the War Powers Act and limiting authorizations for use of force to three years with the option for renewal ...
Constraint on the unilateral powers of the president is long overdue. As in the post-Watergate years, the potential for executive branch abuse should serve as impetus for significant limits on executive power. It will be tempting for the next president to simply imitate President Trump’s imperial conduct to speed through an agenda that undoes Trump policies. That would be a mistake. The perfect time to enact restraints on the president is when the president and the Congress are of the same party ...
As for the embarrassing abdication by Senate Republicans of their oversight and impeachment obligations (and legislative sloth in doing virtually nothing other than ram through judges), the solution is simply to throw them out in the 2020 election and those that follow ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/02/02/senate-debacle-demands-other-means-checking-president/
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