The Ramblings of a Crusty Old Sailor - Drain the Swamp

'DRAIN THE SWAMP' LEGISLATION WOULD CURB LOBBYING AND PENSIONS FOR CONGRESS

Reposted from The Washington Examiner

Rep. Mike Gallagher is pushing for fewer monetary incentives in Congress in hopes of realizing former President Donald Trump's promise to "drain the swamp."

The Wisconsin Republican introduced bills on Wednesday that would prevent Congress from going into recess without adopting a balanced federal budget, establish a uniform five-year ban on lobbying for members of Congress and senior staff of the executive branch, and terminate publicly funded pensions for lawmakers.

"I've been increasingly convinced that major structural reform of Congress is necessary if we're to even have a chance of fixing some of our bigger policy challenges," Gallagher said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. The package was advertised by the congressman as seeking to "Drain the Swamp," a mantra espoused by Trump during his 2016 campaign in seeking to end corruption in government.

Gallagher, who handily won reelection in Wisconsin's 8th Congressional District last year, says the legislative branch is ill-suited to deal with the problems of today. As evidence, he pointed to low approval ratings of Congress and the federal government. An early January poll from Gallup found only 11% of U.S. adults approved of how the government was functioning.

"You have to have a Congress that's actually incentivized to work on legislation, instead of one that's incentivized to raise money for reelection and then monetize their position when they transition to becoming a lobbyist 10 to 20 years from now," Gallagher said.

Gallagher also wants to codify the ethics executive order signed by Trump in 2017 that banned administration officials from lobbying the agencies where they worked for five years after they left their posts. Trump revoked the order in the final hours of his administration before President Biden's inauguration. In 2000, former President Bill Clinton made a similar eleventh-hour move, revoking his own executive order barring his aides from lobbying for five years.

Biden signed an executive order on Inauguration Day that sought to strengthen the ethics standards of the Trump era, placing restrictions on the so-called "revolving door" of former lobbyists and government officials who leave office.

But preventing another president pulling a fast one and creating a brief ethics gap, as well as establishing consistency between administrations and for Congress, is what the congressman wants to ensure.

"The idea is to lock that ethics pledge into law so presidents can't just rescind it willy-nilly," Gallagher said.

More broadly, Gallagher wants Congress to step up so that presidents don't feel the need to overuse their executive authority and cause the political chaos that ensues.

"We keep going further down this path of government by executive fiat, and just as Trump undid all of Obama's executive orders or congressional-executive agreements or pure executive agreements, so, too, now Biden is undoing Trump's executive orders and going further down the path to governing by executive fiat," Gallagher said. "It's chaos. Put aside whether you agree or disagree on the substance, that ping-ponging back and forth creates instability, and it's not what was intended under the Constitution."