Elizabeth Warren unveiled her package of anti-corruption reforms last week at an auspicious moment. On the day the Massachusetts senator released the 289-page bill, two former members of President Donald Trump’s inner circle became felons. A Virginia jury convicted Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, on eight counts related to his political consulting adventures in Ukraine. Minutes later, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to eight charges of tax and bank fraud and campaign-finance violations.

Trump may have campaigned on draining the metaphorical swamp in Washington, D.C., but he’s governed by bathing in it. Multiple members of his cabinet have either resigned or are under scrutiny for using their positions to enrich themselves and their families. Trump’s first two supporters in the House of Representative are charged with insider trading and misuse of campaign funds, respectively. Lobbyists play key roles in shaping the administration’s policy decisions. And Trump himself continues to profit from his businesses, which have become magnets for shady spending by politically connected groups since he took office.

Warren is out to poison the swamp—to make it uninhabitable. Her bill, the Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act, is an audacious piece of legislation that touches upon nearly every aspect of government ethics and transparency in Washington. Its core features would expand disclosure and divestment requirements, curtail lobbying practices in the legislative and executive branches, centralize enforcement functions for ethics violations, and tilt the regulatory process away from large corporations. If signed into law, it would be the most significant effort to strengthen the nation’s anti-corruption laws since 2002, when a right-left coalition of lawmakers pushed the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, also known as BCRA, through Congress.

BCRA’s fate since 2002 is also instructive for how Warren’s bill would fare if passed. While key provisions of the law remain intact, the Supreme Court has struck down some of its most effective checks on money in politics. More broadly, since Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement in 2005, the court’s conservative wing under Chief Justice John Roberts has habitually curtailed anti-corruption laws on First Amendment grounds. Overcoming the court’s aversion to such reforms will be a daunting hurdle for any effort to clean up Washington not just today, but for at least a generation.

Corruption may be America’s oldest enemy. After winning independence from the British Empire, the founders turned their attention to other threats that could undermine the young republic. They knew how historical experiments in self-governance—the Greek democracies, the early Roman republic, the city-states of Renaissance Italy—had been weakened by unalloyed self-enrichment. Fordham University law professor Zephyr Teachout, a candidate for New York attorney general, who has written extensively on corruption, noted that the founders discussed its perils more frequently than “factions, violence, or instability” at the Constitutional Convention.