The GOP Senate will, of course, refuse any vote on the bill. Political scientist Lee Drutman has described the bill as “the most transformative pro-democracy package in decades.” It would thwart voter suppression and extreme gerrymanders while making participation easier. It would bolster transparency on campaign spending and fortify ethics rules constraining lobbyists in all kinds of ways. It would require major presidential candidates to release 10 years of tax returns and require that presidents and vice presidents divest to avoid financial conflicts of interest. The bill that Democrats voted on today would drain that swamp. Thus, as Will Wilkinson writes, Trump’s presidency represents “the apotheosis of the crooked class." He not only relied on a tax system that facilitates gaming and the evasion of accountability to create the mystique that got him elected once in office, Wilkinson points out, Trump furthered this on behalf of that class: “The IRS has been starved of resources, audits of big corporations and the wealthy are down, and big banks and corporations have been given more leeway to rip people off with impunity.” Trump wiped his shoes on this obligation, and thus has exploited the lack of any such requirement to get elected and then to enrich himself with his office. Major candidates have done so for decades because they recognize an obligation to the public. There is no legal requirement that a presidential candidate release his tax returns. And as Brian Beutler has detailed, the plutocrats who reaped the gains helped Trump sell the plan by actively helping to create the illusion that it was pro-worker, demonstrating the seamy overlap between their bottom lines and his self-dealing. That tax cut was an enormous giveaway to America’s corporate elites. Trump’s tax returns might also shed light on his corruption in office - on his extensive self-dealing in potential violation of the Constitution, and on how he personally profited off of the massive corporate tax cut he signed. Trump’s ascension to the presidency itself rests to no small degree on that foundation of fraud, since that inherited fortune helped bolster Trump’s self-made businessman mystique despite being vastly inflated through nefarious means, which he concealed by refusing to release those returns. Cohen also told us that Trump’s tax returns might illuminate how extensive tax fraud vastly inflated the size of Trump’s inherited fortune. We have learned from Trump’s longtime former lawyer Michael Cohen that his tax returns may contain the clues to extensive financial fraud, including gaming assets for insurance and tax avoidance purposes. Those promises were immediately tossed aside, and we are now consumed in a debate over whether our system has an answer to what the real Trumpism has turned out to be - a particularly toxic blend of corruption and plutocracy. Trump came to office by promising to drain the swamp of elite corruption and take on the plutocrats who rig our political economy to enrich themselves. The Democrats’ bill, which just passed the House on a party-line vote, offers the foundation for the Democratic answer to this. In this sense, Manafort stands as a reminder that the Trump presidency, in so many ways, reflects a much larger crisis of elite corruption and impunity.Īfter all, we are now in the midst of discovering whether Trump can indulge in industrial-scale wrongdoing, misconduct, corrupt self-dealing, and likely criminality with impunity, as if rules and laws don’t apply to him. Manafort is going to prison, but his light sentence might not do much to disabuse him of that notion. As Foer notes, all throughout, "he acted with impunity, as if the laws never applied to him.” Writing at the Atlantic, Franklin Foer detailed Manafort’s decades of work on behalf of tax-dodging multinational corporations and murderous authoritarians, his dalliances with international oligarchs and his own “industrial scale” tax evasion via offshore accounts.
Lawmakers and public defenders immediately pointed out that this revealed hideous racial and wealth-based disparities in sentencing. President Trump’s former campaign chairman has been sentenced to only 47 months in prison for multiple financial crimes, far less than sentencing guidelines recommended. 1, a sprawling anti-corruption, pro-democracy piece of legislation that constitutes an ambitious and comprehensive Democratic blueprint for draining the swamp in the Trump era. In a way, it’s fitting that we’re learning of Paul Manafort’s lenient sentence just as House Democrats have voted on and passed H.R.
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