Barbara McQuade — The Fix: Saving America from Corruption
Former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade and legal journalist Kimberly Atkins Stohr dissect the structural conditions that enable political corruption — and what reforms might actually address them.
Why we picked this
McQuade was US Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan and has spent years as a legal analyst — she writes about corruption from a prosecutorial standpoint, not a political one, which makes her diagnosis considerably more useful.
Barbara McQuade, who served as US Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan under President Obama and has become one of the most prominent legal analysts in American media, examines the structural and legal conditions that allow political corruption to flourish in The Fix: Saving America from Corruption. The book moves beyond individual malfeasance to examine the systems — weak disclosure laws, inadequate enforcement, normalized conflicts of interest — that make corruption durable.
Kimberly Atkins Stohr, a senior opinion writer and columnist at The Boston Globe and a former legal correspondent, joins as moderator. Stohr’s work sits at the intersection of law and politics, and she brings a journalist’s instinct for the specific case to what might otherwise be an abstract structural argument.
McQuade’s prosecutorial background grounds the book in what law enforcement can and cannot do — making the reform agenda she proposes credible rather than wishful. For anyone trying to understand why accountability mechanisms keep failing, this offers a more useful analytical frame than most of the available commentary.