Goldsmith & Bauer: “We Still Need Presidential Conflict-of-Interest Reform”
Co-chairs Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith published a piece in Lawfare, “We Still Need Presidential Conflict-of-Interest Reform.” They write:
Reform can respond to eroded norms by replacing them completely with legal prohibitions on targeted conduct such as paid speeches. Or it can utilize other tools, like transparency, to require elected and other senior government officials to account for their management of conflicts of interest, as in the case of the personal financial disclosure requirements under the Ethics in Government Act. Either way, what the norms stand for is validated and their significance reaffirmed. If neither occurs, and without the emergence of genuine public engagement, we can expect the norms to fade away. And they will die out all the more quickly when a president and party leader compounds voter indifference with his own.