Garrett Graff for Politico:

What’s been notable — and worrisome — about the scandals of the Trump years is how little the appetite for subsequent reform has been. The Jan. 6 Committee, which will surely be regarded by history as one of the most effective congressional investigations ever, stands proud in part because of how unique it’s seemed: the sole congressional effort at accountability for the Trump years. Despite Democrats holding both houses of Congress and the presidency over the last two years, there have been few other high-profile hearings and legislative reforms to address the worst abuses of the Trump presidency.

It seems likely that an overhaul of the Electoral Count Act will be passed through Congress at some point this week amid Congress’s final push of the year, and while its evidently much-needed reforms will help clarify roles and prevent a future Trump-like effort to overturn the results of the Electoral College, Congress has attempted few similar reforms.

Congress, for instance, has shown little appetite to limit presidential abuse of the so-called Federal Vacancies Reform Act, which Trump used repeatedly and widely to neuter the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the intelligence community by appointing long-serving “acting” officials to positions normally meant to be Senate-confirmed. It hasn’t sought to limit the executive pardon powers to prevent the president from dangling or granting pardons to fellow co-conspirators in a president’s own crimes, nor has it sought to require presidential nominees to release tax records, limit their ability to profit from businesses while in office, or clarify the “emoluments” clause and curb a president from receiving money from foreign governments.

Remarkably, despite the nation living through multiple “fire and fury” nuclear scares in Trump’s presidency, Congress hasn’t even seriously entertained instituting long-overdue checks-and-balances on the president’s unilateral nuclear launch authority. One of the key reforms to come out of the Watergate era was the War Powers Act, meant to prevent another open-ended war like Vietnam by limiting the president’s ability to commit troops to conflicts overseas without seeking congressional approval, and yet even 50 years later and after living through Trump’s brinkmanship with North Korea, Congress has never seriously considered instituting safeguards to ensure that the commander-in-chief double-check with any other official prior to initiating a global nuclear Armageddon.

Perhaps most surprisingly, Congresshasn’t even made basic changes that would benefit its own security in a future attack on the Capitol — including meaningful reforms to the Capitol Police that would improve its professionalism and minimize political influence or giving the D.C. mayor the authority to activate the D.C. National Guard in the same way that the nation’s other 50 governors do. As the Jan. 6 committee has shown, the White House’s refusal to engage on activating the D.C. National Guard amid the insurrection at the Capitol slowed and stymied any military effort to secure Congress that day and put the members’ own lives at risk — and yet the effort to rectify that authority, which passed the House last year, failed to be included in the compromise legislation demanded by the Senate.

And despite the violent attack on the Capitol, the vast subsequent increase of threats against senators and representatives, and an apparent attempted kidnapping of the speaker of the House that landed Paul Pelosi in the hospital, both the House and Senate have left undone numerous recommendations over the years about addressing its own continuity and ability to function amid the death or incapacitation of members of Congress.