PART ONE: How Democracy Must Function
The rules that held our democracy together existed largely as historical norms and unwritten agreements. The current administration has proved, again and again, that uncodified norms are unenforceable. The following reforms make permanent what should never have required codifying in the first place.
But here’s the caveat. Politicians, historically, are rarely inclined to relinquish power or limit their own tenure. Democratic candidates must be willing to accept these codified guardrails, even at the expense of their self-interest, to earn credibility and truly put country above party.
1A — Executive Accountability
1. Restore and Codify DOJ and Judicial Independence
The Justice Department and federal courts must be permanently insulated from political interference by any administration of either party. Specific codifications include prohibitions on presidential direction of criminal prosecutions, mandatory and enforceable recusal standards, and tenure protections for career prosecutors and judges. A Democratic Congress is the only credible path to making these protections permanent rather than perpetually relitigated.
2. Comprehensive Anti-Corruption Framework
Convert historical norms into enforceable law: mandatory presidential and congressional financial disclosure, strict emoluments enforcement, pardon restrictions that prevent self-dealing, cooling-off periods for federal officials before entering private lobbying, and an independent ethics oversight body with genuine enforcement authority. Democratic legislators have, unsuccessfully, introduced versions of every one of these reforms.
1B — Legislative Accountability
3. Congressional Term Limits
Consistent public support above 80% across all party affiliations makes this one of the most broadly popular reforms in American politics. Career politicians insulated from competitive accountability are not what the founders envisioned. Proposed: 18-year maximum service limits for both House and Senate members. This requires a constitutional amendment — and a national conversation worth having regardless of the outcome. Democrats should run on it openly. An 18-year cap would cost incumbents of both parties, including Democrats’ own.
4. Campaign Finance Transparency and Spending Limits
The unlimited flow of anonymous corporate and dark money into American elections has fundamentally distorted representative government. Reform requires full mandatory disclosure of all political spending regardless of source, aggregate spending limits, and public financing options for federal elections. The goal is not to silence any voice — it is to ensure that no single voice, institutional or individual, can drown out all others. Democratic legislators have introduced every major version of this reform for more than a decade, including the DISCLOSE Act and the Freedom to Vote Act.
This is a practical remedy to what Citizens United unleashed.
1C — Judicial Accountability
5. Supreme Court Nomination and Confirmation Reform
The confirmation process has become a tool of pure partisan obstruction, with rules applied inconsistently depending on which party is in the majority. Reform requires mandatory hearing and floor vote timelines for all nominees, regardless of the political calendar. The integrity and credibility of the Court depend on consistent rules, applied consistently.
6. Federal Judiciary Term Limits
Lifetime tenure made sense when life expectancy was decades shorter. It produces a different institution when justices routinely serve 30 or more years. Democrats must propose 18-year staggered terms for all federal judges, including Supreme Court justices, with post-service emeritus status available. This reform has serious intellectual support across the ideological spectrum from both conservative and liberal legal scholars, and Democratic senators have already introduced the legislation. It removes politics from nominations by making them regular and predictable rather than election-cycle power grabs.
7. Mandatory Judicial Ethics and Recusal Standards
Federal judges, including Supreme Court justices, currently operate under weaker ethics requirements than any other federal official. Establish binding, enforceable ethics standards: mandatory disclosure of gifts, travel, and outside income; clear recusal triggers for financial conflicts and prior advocacy; and an independent enforcement mechanism with actual authority. Democratic legislators have, again unsuccessfully, introduced a binding Supreme Court ethics code in every recent Congress.
1D — Electoral Integrity
8. Ban on Mid-Census Partisan Gerrymandering
Congressional and state legislative district boundaries should be drawn once per decade following the census, by independent nonpartisan commissions, and locked until the next census. The recent practice of redrawing maps mid-cycle purely for partisan advantage — and, tacitly, for racial discrimination — may be legal, but it is a direct manipulation of electoral outcomes and should be explicitly prohibited by federal statute.
Politicians should not choose their voters. Voters should choose their representatives. The federal bills that would deliver this — the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act — are Democratic bills. Republican leadership has blocked them every time.
9. Federal Election Security and Voting Access Standards
Establish minimum federal standards for election security, ballot access, and voting infrastructure applying equally in all states. These standards must satisfy two simultaneous requirements: ensuring that only eligible citizens vote and ensuring that no eligible citizen is prevented from voting by unnecessary administrative burdens.
Further, these standards should plainly state that any tactics intended to depress voter access, from either the state or federal level, will not be tolerated.
Current federal law already prohibits noncitizen voting under penalty of perjury, deportation, and criminal prosecution. Documented evidence from Kansas and other states confirms that proof-of-citizenship requirements prevent far more eligible citizens from voting than noncitizens.
Before the 2013 Secure and Fair Elections, or SAFE, Act took effect in Kansas, noncitizen registration was approximately 0.002% of all registered voters. After the law took effect, it blocked roughly 31,000 eligible citizens — 12% of all applicants — from registering. It was eventually struck down in federal court.
The standard must be: election integrity measures should demonstrably prevent actual fraud without disenfranchising legitimate voters. Nonpartisan, state-run administration of federal elections, standardized security protocols, and guaranteed baseline access to the ballot for all eligible citizens are equally valuable.
Indeed, the current administration is pressuring senators — the measure has already passed the House — to scrap the filibuster and pass the SAVE America Act with a simple majority vote. The SAVE America Act, modeled after Kansas’ SAFE Act, would affect 83% of eligible voters, according to the nonpartisan Voter Participation Center.
This would include an estimated 69 million married women whose last names do not match their birth certificates.