Good luck to Preet Bharara and Christine Todd Whitman

It’s not enough to fret. We're launching a bipartisan project to mend the gaps in our system and make sure our government is competent and trustworthy.

One year into the Trump presidency, it’s clear that the norms and boundaries traditionally guiding American political behavior have deeply eroded. That matters greatly. A workable democracy can thrive only when there are basic rules, often unwritten, that curb abuse and guide policymakers. Though the two of us are from different political parties, we both believe that now is the time to ensure the president and all our public officials adhere to basic rules of the road. It’s time to turn soft norms into hard law.

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Everyone in the political process must act as if limited by invisible guardrails to avoid abuse of power. But at moments of stress or executive impudence, what was assumed to be a solid restriction on improper conduct turns out to be flimsy, relying too much on goodwill or unspoken understandings.

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Public confidence in our institutions is plummeting, and with an ever-quickening news cycle that turns on every tweet, we have to take on these challenges in short order.

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Today, we’re launching an independent democracy task force at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University's School of Law to holistically review these informal rules, which ones should remain guidelines, and perhaps which ones should be enshrined into law. We’ll examine norms surrounding financial conflicts, political interference with law enforcement, the use of government data and science, the appointment of public officials and any other issues that may arise in the coming months. We will be joined by experts and former officials from both parties. The goal is to issue a set of recommendations, policies that can be enacted that mend the gaps in our system and ensure we have a government that functions ably, competently and with the trust of the American people.

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Already some leaders — at least outside Washington — are having these conversations. Legislators in Massachusetts and California have proposed bills that would require the disclosure of tax returns to appear on the state’s presidential election ballots (though California Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed one of those attempts). While we may not agree with their proposed solutions, the fact that states — our laboratories for democracy — are beginning to generate their own debates about norms gives us hope that there’s room to have these discussions on a national level.

  USA Today

I think it is extremely optimistic to hope there will be biparrtisan agreement on these things. In the past, after serious abuses of power, there may have been, but we're several presidents past any bipartisanship on anything other than war and corporate/financial deregulation. And, given Jerry Brown's reaction to something as tame as tax return disclosures, I think it's pretty fair to say that anything this panel comes up with will be vetoed by the president.

But I wish them the very best of luck.