Editorial: Abuse of executive privilege is threat to democracy
Whatever you think of President Donald Trump and his administration - or whatever you thought of presidents Obama, Bush, Clinton, Ford, Harry Truman or Millard Fillmore - where most Americans can agree is that maintaining the strength of our democracy supersedes the desires of whoever currently holds the highest executive office in the land.
Given the deafening noise surrounding the Robert Mueller report, it's understandable that a lot of people will mistake Wednesday's events for just another game of partisan Ping-Pong, just another in an endless lineup of party-line votes.
It is much more serious than that.
On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee voted 24-16 to recommend the full House hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt for refusing to turn over the unredacted Mueller report and related materials to Congress. Just prior to that meeting, President Donald Trump declared he was claiming executive privilege, to keep the unredacted report from public view.
Invoking executive privilege doesn't look like a great legal move - one legal scholar told The Washington Post it is "laughable," pointing out that the Mueller report wasn't written as presidential advice, which is what executive privilege is supposed to protect - but it could turn out to be a brilliant one if the true objective is to delay, dodge and obstruct Congress from its legitimate job of oversight.
Clearly, in Trump's view, essentially anything he wants to keep hidden can be blocked from congressional inquiry by claiming executive privilege. His claims and those of future presidents will get challenged in court, of course, but will take years to sort out, possibly longer than a chief executive's term of office.
The effect will be an executive branch with unnatural power, rendering meaningless the fundamental blocks of our democracy - the three coequal branches of government that serve as checks and balances on each of the others. Imagine a U.S. government that lurches between conservative and liberal authoritarians, depending on who is holding the oversized power of the executive office.
So when New York congressman Jerry Nadler came out of the House Judiciary Committee meeting Wednesday and said, "Now is the time of testing whether we can keep our republic, or whether this republic is destined to change into a different, more tyrannical form of government," he was not overstating the situation.
Trump's view would end congressional oversight, now and forever, giving a future president the ability to do whatever he or she wants - including commit crimes - with no threat of investigation or removal. In this world, Richard M. Nixon never could have been threatened with impeachment.
That the House Judiciary Committee voted along party lines is predictable, but alarming. There's nothing about this debate that should be remotely Democratic or Republican, but it is, partly because House Democrats appear to be indiscriminately throwing everything they can against the wall of the White House to see what sticks and because, with 22 candidates for president, Democrats have no natural leader to explain to the public what they want and why.
For that matter, there is little leadership for Republicans, either, who are disinclined to die on the hill that is Donald Trump. Other than former governor Bill Weld, who has gained little traction as a primary challenger to Trump in 2020, and Richard Burr, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee that is subpoenaing Donald Trump Jr., the few Republicans speaking against the abuses of this administration are pundits like neoconservative analyst William Kristol and former Trump allies who are trying to avoid prison.
It is imperative, then, that citizens cut through the noise for themselves. These are serious times, and we all need to understand what is at stake - for us now, and for our children and grandchildren down the line.