For what is essentially a law-enforcement purpose
Trump’s lawyers are claiming that Congress can’t investigate Trump’s corruption.
Lawyers for President Donald Trump and the House clashed Tuesday in federal court over the extent of Congress’ power to investigate him in the first legal test of Trump’s effort to block sprawling probes of his finances and private business.
Trump wants a judge to prevent a congressional committee from obtaining financial records from his longtime accountant, Mazars USA.
He’s the president, dammit! He’s busy! He has a lot of Fox to watch, a lot of golf to play, a lot of ice cream to gobble, a lot of insult-tweets to tweet. He can’t be worrying about Congress finding out exactly how crooked he is.
Trump and his namesake businesses filed a lawsuit last month asking U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta to revoke a subpoena issued by the House Oversight and Reform Committee. Trump’s lawyers accused the Democratic-controlled committee of abusing their power and said there was no legislative purpose for the request.
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Trump’s personal lawyer, William Consovoy, argued repeatedly that Congress was seeking the president’s financial information for what is essentially a law-enforcement purpose – which was outside its authority – rather than to work on legislation. The subpoena sought Trump’s financial records to look for inconsistencies in his financial disclosure forms, and whether he misstated his holdings for loans that could leave him beholden to foreigners.
If Consovoy’s theory is correct then we might as well admit that we’re a dictatorship right now.
At one point, Mehta asked whether Congress could investigate if the president was engaged in corrupt behavior in office.
“I don’t think that’s the proper subject of investigation as to the president,” Consovoy said, although executive agencies could be investigated.
Mehta sounded incredulous, asking whether Congress could have investigated Watergate, which led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation, and Whitewater, which led to President Bill Clinton’s impeachment.
That’s what they’re aiming for: total immunity from all investigations and checks of any kind. The rules of course will change if ever a Democrats manages to get elected despite all the gerrymandering and ballot-misplacing.
As I see it, there is a precedent for this in English history.
First, Magna Carta limited the power of the monarch, and the monarch’s line as established as an outcome of the Norman Conquest of 1066. But then tensions rose between the monarchy and the parliament, with the monarchy ever gravitating towards absolute dictatorship. This process reached its apogee in the reign of Henry VIII and after his daughter Elizabeth I died childless, in the freshly installed monarchy of the Stuarts. A solution was shortly enough found: chop the head off the King and install in his place a dictator. Oliver Cromwell saw to it enthusiastically. But as chief regicide, Cromwell had to hang onto power till he died.
Then after Cromwell’s death, monarchy was restored but at the same time parliamentary power was enhanced. This increase in power necessitated in turn a series of anti-corruption reforms leading to the modern Westminster system, with a neutered and redundant House of Lords and the monarch’s power limited to an ability to dissolve Parliament, and to call a fresh election; popular power emerging triumphant at long last.
Trouble is, the American presidency was created by the Founding Fathers, at the time of the 1777 revolution, which I would maintain was Britain’s ‘bourgeois revolution’ in the Marxist sense, and those Fathers were themselves creatures of their own historic time and setting. Trump is an elected king, but with far greater power than any modern British monarch, or for that matter British prime minister.
Under the Westminster system, there is no need for an impeachment process, nor any need for a formal procedure for removing the monarch, apart from a whisper in the ear that abdication might be a good idea. (That actually happened in 1936.) I agree here with Winston Churchill’s assessment of Westminster as the ‘least worst’ system ever devised.
If Trump had been a British, Australian, Canadian or NZ prime minister, his government by now would have lost the confidence of the parliament, and a fresh PM would have been by now installed: probably just by a vote of that same parliament, or else by the Head of State, calling a fresh national election.
Trump’s presidency hopefully will not go longer than one term, and may well end with an impeachment. But as long as it endures, America will be bogged down in a constitutional crisis.
The US Constitution was once a lighthouse for the world. Sadly, not any more. Its light is dimming. As any card sharp would probably tell you, it’s been Trumped.