https://twitter.com/ewarren/status/1559993334432780289
- ewarren
Elizabeth Warren -- "Pocahontas" or "Faux-cahontas," as the acerbic Howie Kerr up here has been calling her -- tweeted yesterday that we should try to clamp down on political corruption by forbidding Congressmen from owning or trading stock. She didn't mean bulls and cows.
Now, there are only two possibilities. Either she is a sleazy politician who says something she knows is immensely stupid and has not any chance of happening, even if it were Constitutional; or she is herself immensely stupid. You might as well forbid Congressmen from owning real estate, or from using legal tender. Not own stock? How is that even conceivable? Anybody who has a retirement plan owns stock. Anybody running a fair-sized business owns stock. And of course, all you'd have to do to get around such a law would be to put the stuff in the name of your spouse or your child or your sibling or some legal fiction of a company.
I would be quite happy to support an amendment to the Constitution, forbidding the sibling, child, or spouse of any current or former Congressman or current or former president or vice president or cabinet-level secretary from holding a similar federal office. Sure, I know that that would mean we'd sacrifice Bush the Junior, Clinton the Shrew, Cheney Unlimited, Kennedy as Far as the Eye Can See, but hey, the republic would survive. Probably the finest such kinsman in our history was John Quincy Adams. That would have been a real loss. But I think it's generally downhill from there.