Welcome to the Beat. I'm Ari Melburgh, and tonight we have news about how the government will be run in this

period of rising inequality and this populist anger at elites who blatantly enrich themselves.

That stretches from the corporate health care industry to politicians giving themselves and their

donors tax cuts. But to get there, we're going to begin a little further back

in history with concerns about the politician's swampy corruption. More on that swamp monster

and that old movie in just a moment. But I could tell you that reformers have been battling corruption

in Washington for a long, long time. And sometimes it's actually useful, especially in times like these, to go back and look from the progressive trust busters

to even some traditional conservatives like John McCain. There is actually a very long history

with peaks and valleys, ebb and flow, of people, reformers trying to take on corruption in their rakes.

We've got to clean up our act.

You were mentioning how the war in Iraq may have hurt me.

I think the biggest blow to our base wasn't the war in Iraq.

It was spending, going completely out of control and the corruption.

Look, I don't use the word corruption lightly. We have former Republican members of Congress in

federal prison. And unfortunately, there's more to come.

Republicans in prison are more to come. The lawmakers in trouble for corruption. And that was back

when top Republicans, McCain, of course, got his party's nomination eventually. Top

Republicans said it was bad to be on the wrong side of the law or a corruption case or be convicted

or go to prison. We can get into how it's a little different in this MAGA era,

but that warning from Senator McCain came from someone who saw that from within, and that

unchecked corruption will grow. It doesn't just sit at some level where a few people are

self-dealing when they get away with it. When more politicians and politicos and hangers on and

...