Trump Is Playing Truth or Dare With American Democracy. So Far, Democracy Is Losing.
Let me pause for a moment and congratulate the political staff of the Washington Post for publishing an actual impeachable offense in its newspaper on Wednesday. El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago granted them an interview in which he pretty much said that the whole constitutional structure of the United States government doesn't apply to him.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Trump said that complying with congressional requests was unnecessary after the White House cooperated with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe of Russian interference and the president’s own conduct in office. “There is no reason to go any further, and especially in Congress where it’s very partisan - obviously very partisan,” Trump said.
Article I? Gone.
On Tuesday, two White House officials said the administration plans to fight a subpoena issued by the House Judiciary Committee for former White House counsel Donald McGahn by asserting executive privilege over his testimony. Separately, the administration directed a former White House official not to comply with a subpoena from the House Oversight Committee, prompting the panel to move to hold him in contempt of Congress. And the Treasury Department defied a second demand from House Democrats to turn over six years of President Trump’s tax returns.
You say you want a constitutional crisis? Wel-hel, you know, you've just been shown the plans.
In his interview with The Post, Trump maintained that the White House Counsel’s Office has not “made a final, final decision” about whether it will formally assert executive privilege and try to block congressional testimony. But he said he opposes cooperation with House Democrats, who he claimed are trying to score political points against him.“I don’t want people testifying to a party, because that is what they’re doing if they do this,” Trump said.
The president said Democrats should be satisfied with what McGahn and other officials told Mueller, calling his decision to allow them to meet with federal investigators an act of transparency that made further congressional cooperation unreasonable. “I allowed my lawyers and all the people to go and testify to Mueller - and you know how I feel about that whole group of people that did the Mueller report,” Trump said. “I was so transparent; they testified for so many hours. They have all of that information that’s been given.” “I fully understood that at the beginning. I had my choice,” Trump added of his decision to allow his aides to testify as part of Mueller’s probe. “I could have taken the absolute opposite route.”
To which we reply with the opinion of that noted constitutional scholar, Professor Rock from Brooklyn.
At this moment, right now, today, the president* is abusing the powers of his office to obstruct legitimate congressional oversight over his own conduct in that office. He's doing it on at least two fronts, and he's doing it right in the pages of one of the country's most prominent newspapers. Imagine Nixon having Woodward and Bernstein in for a nice chat in, say, January of 1973, at which he ran the same rap. This whole administration* is a monumental exercise in truth or dare and, right now, everything about American democracy is losing, badly.
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