President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign promise to “drain the swamp” is becoming a slogan among Democrats who want to discredit him. Because his White House appointments and policies differ from theirs, they say he is breaking that promise.
“Congressional Republicans are already forgetting what the president-elect had said: drain the swamp,” Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) scolded. “If you bought into the whole ‘drain the swamp’ nonsense, I have some very bad news for you,” teased MSNBC’s Steve Benen.
But “drain the swamp” was always about shaking up the federal bureaucracy by bringing in outsiders who achieved success in other fields. Trump isn’t betraying his pledge. He’s following through.
Many Democrats fail to see that, because the only “swamp” they see is “money in politics.” You don’t have to like conservatives like Betsy DeVos or Andy Puzder — Trump’s picks for education secretary and labor secretary, respectively — to acknowledge they’re undoubtedly outsiders to the federal bureaucracy.
The contrast is best illustrated by incoming White House Counsel Don McGahn. McGahn served on the Federal Election Commission from 2008 to 2013, where he opposed Democratic efforts to expand campaign-finance regulations. To Democrats, that makes him the worst of the swamp creatures.
Yet one only has to read the first sentence of The New York Times’ recent profile of McGahn to recognize a different perspective: “In a town filled with button-down lawyers, Donald F. McGahn II has always been an iconoclast bent on shaking things up.”
Democratic proposals to “get money out of politics” have been tried for over 40 years, starting with the institution of campaign-contribution limits and donor-disclosure requirements via the Federal Election Campaign Act in the 1970s. It hasn’t gone as planned.
Notably, comparisons across states find no correlation between campaign-finance restrictions and public corruption, quality of governance or public trust in government. Given how dramatically these laws vary from state to state, this is startling. Eleven states allow individuals to donate any amount to candidates, while other states limit contributions to just a few hundred dollars.
Yet from the start, progressives have insisted on misreading Trump’s anti-corruption message as an endorsement of their failed policies. Campaign-finance activist Larry Lessig, who briefly entered the race for the Democratic nomination, saw Trump as a potential ally since he began the election largely reliant on self-funding.
The beleaguered Sunlight Foundation, which wants stricter regulation of the political process, wrote last month that “drain the swamp . . . implies . . . a lot of possibilities: getting rid of corruption and conflicts of interest, lessening the grip of money in politics and lobbyists, and a change in the establishment.”
Who doesn’t want to get rid of corruption? The curveball comes when Sunlight spells out its specific proposals. These include forcing nonprofits to publicly report the private information of their supporters, opening those supporters to both government and unofficial harassment and intimidation; empowering the IRS, FCC and SEC to regulate political advocacy; and mandating “real-time” disclosure laws that would be a logistical nightmare for all but the wealthiest groups. In short, more regulation, more government power and more power for lawyers, accountants and lobbyists in Washington.
In other words, a bigger swamp.
Even if you support these policies, it’s silly to say they’re the only way to change the culture of Washington. When Trump says “drain the swamp,” only progressives hear “force nonprofits to disclose their donors” or “add more regulation of political participation.”
For Trump voters, extensive regulation, massive bureaucracy and “the swamp” go hand in hand. Trump’s election was not a call to try what we’ve been trying, only harder. It was a call to try something new. Democrats may not like Trump’s way of shaking up DC, but hey — elections have consequences.
Brad Smith, former Federal Election Commission chairman, is chairman of the Center for Competitive Politics, where Luke Wachob is the McWethy fellow and policy analyst.