Trump Attacks Watergate Laws in Massive Shift of Ethics System
Then-Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman was 32 when, as a member of the House Judiciary Committee, she voted in 1974 for three articles of impeachment against President Richard M. Nixon. She spent the next few years as part of a Congress that passed wave after wave of laws to rein in future presidents.
A half-century later, Holtzman, a New York Democrat, is watching as President Donald Trump takes aim at post-Watergate reforms on transparency, spending, conflicts of interest and more. By challenging and disregarding, in letter or in spirit, this slew of 1970s laws, Trump is essentially closing the 50-year post-Watergate chapter of American history – and ushering in a new era of shaky guardrails and blurred separation of powers.
'We didn't envision this,' Holtzman said. 'We saw Nixon doing it, but he hadn't done it on this vast a scale. Trump is saying, 'Congress cannot tell me what to do about anything.''
In 1976, for example, Congress created a 10-year term for FBI directors; Trump has forced out two FBI directors. The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 aimed to prevent presidents from dismantling agencies; Trump has essentially done just that. Lawmakers in 1978 installed independent inspectors general in government offices; Trump has fired many of them and is seeking to replace them with loyalists.
Trump has also disregarded post-Watergate safeguards intended to prevent the unjustified firings of federal workers. His U.S. DOGE Service has skirted rules on government secrecy and personal data. He has declared numerous emergencies despite Congress's efforts to rein them in.
This broad rejection of the post-Watergate laws underlines the country's shift from an era focused on clean government and strict ethics to the rise of a president whose appeal stems in part from his willingness to violate such rules and constraints.
'There has been a collapse, at least temporarily, of the kind of outrage and ethical standards that were prevalent during the days of Watergate,' said Richard Ben-Veniste, who headed the special counsel's Watergate Task Force. 'The excesses of Watergate now seem naive. They have been overtaken by a system that is based on quid pro quo.'
Many of Trump's moves face legal challenges, and they may be reversed by the courts – or the Supreme Court could enshrine them. Some scholars welcome Trump's effort to claw back presidential power, saying the post-Watergate Congresses, caught up in an anti-Nixon fervor, improperly sought to rewrite the Constitution in the legislative branch's favor.
'Congress should not be able to fundamentally change the constitutional balance between the two branches,' said John Yoo, a senior Justice Department official under President George W. Bush, referring to the legislative and executive. 'Several of the Watergate reforms went too far. The presidency functioned better, and the separation of powers functioned better, before.'
White House spokesman Harrison Fields said Trump is not dismantling ethics but reviving them in a system that had become corrupted.
'President Trump is restoring the integrity of the Executive Branch following four years of relentless abuse through weaponization, lawfare, and unelected bureaucrats running the nation via autopen,' Harrison said in a statement. 'The President and his administration are the most transparent in American history, seamlessly executing the will of the American people in accordance with their constitutional authority.'
Nixon's resignation on Aug. 9, 1974, was a seismic political event, as Americans at the time were far less hardened to scandal and more willing to denounce wrongdoing by their party's leaders. In November of that year, Democrats swept to historic majorities in Congress, carried on a wave of pro-reform sentiment.
They crafted restraints on presidential authority that had not occurred to anyone before Nixon's startling use of government power against his adversaries. Nixon's team had broken into Democratic headquarters, spied on domestic targets, secretly taped White House visitors, misused campaign funds and even developed an 'enemies list' with a plan to 'use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies,' as White House counsel John Dean put it.
Presidents of both parties have chafed at those restrictions but largely followed them. Until now.
Some Democrats say Trump, by disregarding many of the statutes, is going further than Nixon, who at least paid lip service to his obligation to follow the law.
'Nixon was essentially a criminal, but an ordinary criminal who accepted the fact that the laws applied to him and that if he tried to violate them he would be subject to punishment,' said David Dorsen, an assistant chief counsel of the Senate Watergate Committee. 'Trump considers himself above the law, so that the system is to be rejected by him when he feels like it should be.'
It is far from clear that Trump is seeking to eviscerate the Watergate laws specifically. He has always taken an expansive view of his own power, and that has set up a natural collision with the rules written by lawmakers trying to rein in what they saw as rogue presidents.
That collision is unfolding on numerous fronts. Watergate-era lawmakers, furious at Nixon for refusing to spend money they had authorized, passed a law forbidding 'impoundment.' Trump ignored that when he temporarily froze government grants, and he has all but dismantled an agency created by Congress, the U.S. Agency for International Development.
In response to Nixon's push to replace civil servants with political loyalists, Congress created the Merit Systems Protection Board in 1978 to hear cases of federal employees claiming unjust termination. Trump, who wants to force out thousands of workers, has dismissed a key member of the board and sought to neutralize it.
Among the most notable post-Watergate reforms was the creation in 1978 of inspector general offices to pursue wrongdoing throughout the government. The law has been bolstered repeatedly since then and number of IGs has expanded to more than 70, with some Republican lawmakers among their strongest supporters.
Trump fired 16 inspectors general shortly after taking office, in apparent violation of the law that requires 30 days' notice and a detailed rationale for such dismissals. Previous presidents, including Ronald Reagan, have also sought to fire IGs, but not in such a sweeping, peremptory manner.
For many of Trump's critics, his rejection of the post-Watergate worldview goes beyond individual laws to a broader disregard of the principle that a president should not use the federal government to advance his personal interests.
When Trump dines with people who enriched his family by buying his meme coin, or rewards his top campaign donor with a powerful federal job, they say, he is obliterating the red line drawn after Watergate.
'The background was a president who, on every front that you looked, was engaged in an abuse of power,' Holtzman said of the Watergate reforms. But now, she added, 'You have Elon Musk, who can spend almost $300 million to elect a president – when we passed a law specifically to limit expenditures because of the abuses we saw in Watergate.'
The courts are weighing almost all of Trump's moves; he has won some victories, and legal experts say it is likely the Supreme Court will approve at least some of what he is doing. The judiciary has become far more supportive of presidential power in the years since Watergate.
Yoo said it is notable that Trump is insisting on his right to fire any executive branch employee, including those Congress sought to shield with specified terms. 'If he succeeds in that, it would end the Watergate experiment in creating these independent bureaucracies,' said Yoo, who teaches at the University of California at Berkeley.
'On issue after issue, he has either taken these Watergate laws and interpreted them way beyond what the Congress originally wanted or just directly challenged their constitutionality, and you're seeing them go up to the Supreme Court right now,' Yoo said.
Still, it was clear long before Trump that some of the most far-reaching Watergate reforms were floundering. The courts struck down several campaign finance rules, for example, saying they violated the First Amendment.
In 1999, Congress chose not to renew its independent counsel law, which was a response to Nixon's notorious 'Saturday Night Massacre.' After Nixon fired Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox – along with Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy – Congress decreed that a three-judge panel would appoint such prosecutors in the future.
But the system proved unwieldy. The Clinton administration alone faced seven independent counsel probes, many lasting for years or focused on minor allegations. By 1999, lawmakers of both parties were happy to let the statute expire and return to a system of special counsels appointed by the attorney general.
The political culture has clearly shifted in dramatic ways since the late 1970s. Holtzman said her colleagues had hoped the threat of impeachment, which ultimately forced Nixon to resign, would deter future presidents if the new laws did not.
Since then, President Bill Clinton was impeached once and Trump twice. But all three Senate trials resulted in acquittal largely along party lines. And Trump's impeachment did not prevent him from retaking the White House in decisive fashion last year.
'Naively, we thought the impeachment itself would stand as a warning to future presidents, and it hasn't,' Holtzman said.
Rufus Edmisten, who was a deputy chief counsel for the Senate Watergate Committee, said Congress's willingness to assert itself in a bipartisan way has all but evaporated since the hot day in the summer of 1973 when he delivered a congressional subpoena to a sitting president.
'We're right back to another Watergate, except worse,' Edmisten said. 'Having been in the middle of all kinds of things for 10 years, especially Watergate, I cringe when I think how Congress has become a lapdog. It's taken a back seat in the separation of powers order of things. It's almost an afterthought.'
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