The blue tsunami last Tuesday rinsed the country of its worse impulses. At least for the time being.
Its coast-to-coast breadth showed that the United States is not, in its essence, a Trumpist nation. Its depth, penetrating well into the American South and
elevating so many African Americans to high office at both the state and federal levels of government, demonstrated that we are not an endemically racist nation. Along related lines, its extraordinary diversity in elected officials reveals that we are not fundamentally a misogynistic nor an unconstitutionally Christian country.
We are, at heart, a more hopeful and much less hateful and fearful nation than the President, his Administration and the Republican Party have all tried to engineer us to be.
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What now? As has often been noted, the Democratic Party is a large tent. It comprises people of many different backgrounds and diverse viewpoints. Today, its moderate and progressive wings differ on the degrees of change America requires if it is to be the “shining city on the hill” imagined in our hopeful political rhetoric: a free, welcoming and prosperous nation.1 The future of the new Democratic control of the Congress remains uncertain.
One controversy is over whether the party will spend too much of its time and mandate on imposing legal consequences for the widespread criminality and other corruption in the Trump Administration, using investigative committees and impeachments. And correspondingly too little time passing legislation to improve the lives, rights and security of the American people.
Even Republicans are now hypocritically expressing concern over this apparent dilemma. Will Congressional Democrats now “waste” time seeking retribution against their political opponents rather than work to meet the needs of people for lower prices and health care, although in the GOP view this means through tax cuts and other conservative measures that have always failed to deliver nothing more than greater riches for the haves and greater immiseration for the have-nots. And although Donald Trump has turned the U.S. Department of Justice into a corrupted machine of personal retribution against his political opponents.
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The dichotomy is a false one. After now a decade of Trumpism, with two years remaining for the current Administration, yes, the nation is in need of many repairs–and these are not at all architectural. These include new laws and policies to address the housing and affordable health care needs of the majority of Americans. To return to the Congress the power to make war, to impose tariffs, and to control the expenditures of the Executive Branch. To establish humane and sensible policies for immigration reform. To revive and strengthen protections for our air and water and climate, and the original mission of the federal Environmental Protection Agency, itself created by a Republican president–Richard Nixon–in 1970. To provide for the special material and legal needs of such marginalized groups as the poor and sexual identity minorities.
To legislatively repair the irresponsible Supreme Court decisions on voting rights that have brought foreseeably racist and undemocratic consequences in too many states’ voting laws. To reassert the nation’s commitments to our post-World War II allies and its critique and rejection of authoritarian regimes around the globe. And to legislate against the widespread corruption in Washington, from the White House to the Supreme Court.
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But at least equally important for the new Congress to achieve is the recovery of the Rule of Law for the country. At the core of this Law is the righting of wrongs, without fear or favor, as the saying goes. This is hardly the same thing as the retribution so many Republicans now seem to fear from investigations and prosecutions. This is no less than saving the heartbeat of the U.S. Constitution, the engine of democracy, and the moral core of the “liberty and justice for all” in the American Pledge of Allegiance. This is the foundation on which all else that is required for a good nation stands.
From its hateful immigration policies to its rampant and blithe corruption, Trump Republicans in Washington have whittled the Rule of Law down from an imposing pillar of oak to a heap of lumber, only some pieces capable of resembling it, especially the federal district courts. This is what is in desperate need of (re)building. Not a narcissistic ballroom, or a “triumphal arch” as a monument to the nation’s worst president that would shade the authentic glory of Arlington National Cemetery.
Restoring the Rule of Law to the nation requires justice, and justice requires Congressional investigations and, ultimately, the deserved punishment of criminal actors regardless of their positions or their politics. This includes holding responsible those in the Department of Justice who have illegally withheld the Epstein evidence from Congress and the American people, most importantly the victims of his sex trafficking. Democrats in Congress must now pursue the cause of justice just as they must also work to recast the nation’s social welfare nets and rehabilitate our international alliances both near and far.
In pursuing all of these reforms, Democrats in Congress must not let the best be the enemy of the good in their legislating.
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Finally, Democrats must work earnestly to reduce American wealth inequality and to rein in the power of corporations in both politics and the economy. Like much else in our national government, these are both urgent goals and heavy lifts. But they are necessary if the nation is to stabilize itself in the long term around rules of fairness, justice and opportunity.
An important place for lawmakers’ focus is the re-regulation of American corporations, which the Trump Administration and the Republican-controlled Congress have almost completely freed from law. But long before Trump ascended to power, and greatly enabled by the very unwise 2010 Supreme Court decision permitting unlimited corporate contributions to political campaigns,2 large corporations have starved the nation’s financial accounts in their legal evasion of taxes, many wealthy firms paying no annual taxes at all. They have distorted our economy and prices with increasing monopolistic control of such leading sectors as the internet, artificial intelligence, and food production. They have denied the public interest in using their massive political resources to restrict laws protecting the environment, labor rights, financial fairness and safe workplaces.
A reasonable place to begin involves increasing the transparency of both corporate and government behaviors, both ever less visible to the public under the current administration. Here’s one suggestion: passage of the Corporate Crime Database Act, first introduced in both Houses of Congress in 2023 and re-introduced in the current session of Congress in 2025.
The proposed legislation was developed by Congresswoman Mary Gay Scanlon and her staff,3and it has been co-sponsored by several members of the House and Senate.
The law has twice been referred to the respective Houses’ Committees on the Judiciary, where it has languished without further action under the current Republican leadership of both committees. But those committees’ ranking Democratic members, Senator Richard Blumenthal and Representative Jamie Raskin, have both been cosponsors of Representative Scanlon’s legislation. Representative Raskin is set to be the Chairman of the Committee in January, and with Democratic majorities in both Houses its chances of passage have increased, if its signature in the White House remains far from guaranteed.
The law would require the Department of Justice to establish an annual national collection of data on all violations of federal law committed by businesses and individual white-collar offenders, and the federal government’s legal responses to the offenses. This would constitute a running ledger of offenses committed by powerful companies and persons that would be roughly equivalent to the decades-long annual Uniform Crime Reports of the FBI, which track the known common or street crimes, largely committed by the nation’s poorer people. It would more fairly focus the light of law on violations of all kinds, by all offenders regardless of rank.
It would also make possible the improvement of enforcement policies against wrongdoing by high status offenders. It would do so by enabling research on repeat violators and the effectiveness of legal penalties in reducing their offenses, as we have long seen in the case of street crimes.
It would be a fair place to begin the nation’s rebuilding.
- The phrase was famously used in this way by the Republican President Ronald Reagan in his 1981 inaugural address. Just before his own inauguration in 1961, John F. Kennedy cited the Biblical phrase “city on a hill” to describe his ambition that the U.S. become a beacon of hope for the world.[↩]
- Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.[↩]
- Full Disclosure: With my sociology colleague Professor Sally Simpson, I consulted with the Congressional staff of Representative Scanlon on the substance and wording of this legislation based on our research funded by the U.S. Department of Justice. Our 2015 report to the Department can be found here, and a much shorter article on it can be found here. The proposed legislation can be seen here.[↩]
