Reform library
Constitutional amendments and federal statutes, drafted as text a legislature could introduce tomorrow. Each closes a route by which money, secrecy, or foreign influence captures public power.
Constitutional authority
4 drafts01Political Money SovereigntyVoters cannot hold anyone accountable for money they cannot trace. Federal law already requires campaigns to itemize contributions over $200 and to report independent expenditures within 24 hours during the pre-election window (52 U.S.C. § 30104; 11 C.F.R. § 104.4). What it does not do is trace money past the first entity that touches it. A donor gives to a 501(c)(4), the (c)(4) gives to a super PAC, and the public disclosure shows only the (c)(4)'s name. Donor-advised funds compound the problem: once a person deposits money with a DAF sponsor, the law treats the money as the sponsor's own, and the original donor disappears from every public record. Investigative reporting has traced over $170 million from Fidelity Charitable, Schwab Charitable, and Vanguard Charitable into Project 2025-affiliated groups through exactly this mechanism. This is not a hypothetical gap; it is the standard architecture of contemporary political money.Constitutional Amendment and Enabling Statutev0.22026-07-0405Citizenship and Lawful AdmissionCitizenship, parole, and asylum are three different legal categories that public debate routinely collapses into one. This package treats them separately, on purpose.Constitutional Amendment and Enabling Legislationv0.22026-07-0406Alliance and War PowersCongress has one working tool for controlling war and alliance commitments: the power of the purse and the power to legislate. It has largely stopped using both. The War Powers Resolution of 1973 (50 U.S.C. §§ 1541–1548) was supposed to fix this. It requires the President to report the introduction of forces into hostilities within 48 hours and to terminate that use of force within 60 days (90 with a safety extension) absent a declaration of war or specific statutory authorization. It has not worked. Presidents of both parties have either denied the statute binds them at all or have argued their way around its trigger word, "hostilities," which the statute never defines. In 2011, the Obama administration told Congress that sustained U.S. airstrikes over Libya did not constitute "hostilities" because no ground troops were exposed to return fire — a reading almost no outside legal scholar endorsed, and Congress took no binding action to stop it. In January 2020, after the Soleimani strike, the Trump administration sent Congress a war-powers notification that was entirely classified, with no public version, and argued no further authorization was needed; Congress passed a resolution directing withdrawal of unauthorized force against Iran, and the President vetoed it. The pattern is consistent: a reporting requirement with a deadline, and no enforcement mechanism that survives a presidential veto or a contested definition.Constitutional Amendmentv0.22026-07-0411Lawmaking DisciplineCongress routinely passes bills that almost no member has read. The 2022 omnibus appropriations act ran 4,155 pages and was released to the public roughly two days before the Senate vote that sent it to the President. The CARES Act — an 880-page bill committing roughly $2 trillion — passed the Senate 96–0 by unanimous consent hours after the final text was posted, with no recorded vote on the substance and no member able to credibly claim to have read it. This is not an accident of any one Congress or party. It is the normal operating procedure for the bills that matter most: must-pass funding measures, emergency packages, and end-of-session deals, bundled into a single vote and dropped on lawmakers overnight so that voting no means shutting down the government.Constitutional Amendmentv0.22026-07-04Foreign influence
2 drafts02Foreign Agency and LobbyingCurrent law already requires foreign agents to register before acting. The Foreign Agents Registration Act (22 U.S.C. § 611 et seq.) says so on its face: a person may not act as an agent of a foreign principal without a registration on file, and anyone who becomes such an agent must file within ten days. The rule looks like a before-acting regime. In practice it is enforced as an after-the-fact one. The Department of Justice's Inspector General found in September 2016 that DOJ lacked a coherent FARA enforcement strategy, that FBI field offices described the approval process for bringing charges as an obstacle rather than a backstop, and that only seven criminal FARA cases were brought between 1966 and 2015. Registration became something DOJ asked for after a scandal surfaced, not something it verified before influence activity began.Model Federal Legislationv0.22026-07-0404Universities, NGOs, and Prestige LaunderingFederal law already requires universities to disclose large foreign gifts and contracts. It doesn't work. Section 117 of the Higher Education Act has required this disclosure since 1986, but for over three decades the Department of Education ran it with no dedicated staff, no searchable public database, and almost no enforcement — a compliance regime so dormant that a 2020 Department review found hundreds of millions of dollars in unreported foreign funds sitting at major research universities in plain sight. A 2019–2021 enforcement push opened investigations at 19 institutions and formally closed only four. The reporting portal itself wasn't rebuilt into a usable, centralized system until 2020, and Congress is still trying to fix the underlying statute today: the bipartisan DETERRENT Act, passed by the House in 2025, would cut the Section 117 threshold from $250,000 to $50,000 and eliminate it entirely for gifts tied to China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. That bill, still pending, only reaches degree-granting institutions of higher education. It does nothing about foreign money flowing into think tanks, museums, media nonprofits, or fellowship programs that shape the same public debates without offering a single class.Federal statutev0.22026-07-04Institutional integrity
4 drafts03Shell Ownership and Strategic AssetsRight now, if a hostile foreign government wants to control a US port, farm near a missile base, or data broker holding military personnel records, it can usually do it through a chain of shell companies. Nobody has to lie — the paperwork just stops at an entity name.Constitutional Amendment and Model Statutev0.22026-07-0407Executive AccountabilityIn *Trump v. United States*, 603 U.S. 593 (2024), the Supreme Court held that a former president has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for acts within his "conclusive and preclusive" constitutional authority, presumptive immunity for all other "official acts," and no immunity for unofficial acts — but that prosecutors may not use official acts as evidence even when prosecuting conduct the Court treats as unofficial. That evidentiary rule (Part III-C of the opinion, joined by five Justices and rejected by Justice Barrett in partial dissent) is doing most of the practical work: a president who launders a bribe through an official meeting, a pardon, or a Justice Department directive can now block prosecutors from telling the jury the official act happened at all. The predictable result is that any senior official who commits a crime through the machinery of office rather than off the books becomes harder to convict than one who commits the same crime as a private citizen. That is backwards. This amendment restores the ordinary rule that ran from the Founding until 2024: official position is not a defense to bribery, extortion, obstruction, or the other offenses listed below, and official conduct is not walled off from the jury.Constitutional Amendmentv0.22026-07-0408Judicial IntegrityThe Supreme Court polices its own ethics, and in November 2023 it wrote down rules for the first time — a Code of Conduct, adopted after decades without one. The Code has no enforcement mechanism. No one investigates complaints against a Justice, no one reviews a Justice's recusal decision, and no one but the Justice decides whether the Code was followed. That gap is not an oversight; it is the design. The recusal statute, 28 U.S.C. § 455, works the same way — it tells a Justice to step aside when impartiality "might reasonably be questioned," then leaves the same Justice to make that call, with no appeal and no second reader.Constitutional Amendmentv0.22026-07-0409Public-Service Anti-CapturePublic power turns into private return in a few predictable places: trading on information you get from your job, betting on the sectors you regulate, walking out the door into a job the same office made possible, collecting a fee that only makes sense as a reward for something you already did in office, and routing money through a spouse, a foundation, or a speaking fee instead of a paycheck. This bill closes those off. It bans individual-stock and sector-bet trading by senior officials while they serve, requires blind trusts or plain index funds instead, and extends the cooling-off periods that already exist in federal law — but are too short and too easy to route around — into years long enough that a regulator cannot simply wait out a rulemaking before cashing in with the company on the other side of it.Federal statutev0.22026-07-04Information/data sovereignty
2 drafts12Information SovereigntyForeign states don't need to hack an election to shape one. They can fund a media outlet, buy an ad network, rent an influencer, or generate a video of a candidate saying something he never said — and none of it has to say "Moscow" or "Beijing" anywhere on it. This bill doesn't ban foreign viewpoints or punish Americans for holding them. It requires that when foreign governments pay for, direct, or fabricate political content aimed at U.S. audiences, the audience gets to know that. Disclosure, not censorship, is the mechanism — the same mechanism Congress has used since 1938, when it passed the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) requiring agents of foreign principals to label what they distribute rather than banning what they say.Model Federal Legislationv0.22026-07-0413Data, Platforms, and Cyber InfrastructureCongress has already legislated most of the pieces this bill needs. It banned data brokers from selling sensitive Americans' data to China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran in the Protecting Americans' Data from Foreign Adversaries Act of 2024 (PADFA, Division I of Pub. L. 118-50). It forced the sale of TikTok rather than let a foreign-adversary-controlled company keep running an app used by 170 million Americans, in the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (Pub. L. 118-50, Division H), a law the Supreme Court unanimously upheld in *TikTok v. Garland* (2025). It built a 72-hour incident-reporting clock and a 24-hour ransom-payment clock into critical-infrastructure law through the Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act of 2022 (CIRCIA). And it built a voluntary, liability-shielded threat-sharing channel between industry and government in the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 (CISA 2015).Model Federal Legislationv0.22026-07-04