Perspective: Trump’s stonewalling of Congress is flatly unconstitutional. How far will he push it?
White House senior adviser Stephen Miller is among the people Democrats in Congress want to question. By Bob Bauer Bob Bauer is professor of practice and distinguished scholar in residence at New York University Law School. He served as White House Counsel to President Obama. April 29 at 12:56 PM It is all too easy to underestimate the significance of President Trump’s outright defiance of Congress’s request that senior aides testify.
But this president has declared that he will fight “all the subpoenas,” deeming them purely partisan in motivation. “I don’t want people testifying to a party, because that is what they’re doing if they do this,” he has said. Trump simply does not have this unilateral authority to control the information that Congress seeks. As the Supreme Court stated in a 1959 case, “The power of inquiry has been employed by Congress throughout our history, over the whole range of the national interests concerning which Congress might legislate or decide upon due investigation not to legislate.”
President George W. Bush unsuccessfully urged the courts to recognize a more sweeping form of immunity — and failed. Rejecting Bush’s attempt to prevent testimony by two senior aides, White House counsel Harriet Miers and senior adviser Karl Rove, U.S. District Judge John Bates found no basis for the administration’s position: “Unfortunately for the Executive, this line of argument has been virtually foreclosed by the Supreme Court.
It stands to reason that the House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah E. Cummings wants to hear Miller’s testimony on these policies — and asked him to appear voluntarily. The administration declined, and that first round might have then segued into a move toward a negotiated compromise. But again, the president objects to the testimony, period.
It is true that the Obama administration objected to a Republican congressional request for testimony from former Obama administration deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes and, on another occasion, former assistant to the president for political affairs and outreach David Simas. But Obama did not assert any claim of absolute immunity in either instance. Nor were the issues or the resolutions the same.
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