NYT's David Leonhardt: "A Needless Surrender" By Democrats

Compendium Of Best Pax Posts On The Impeachment Inquiry - And What Needs To Be Done

https://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2019/11/compendium-of-best-pax-posts-on-house.html

Let's Have A Reality TV Impeachment For Our Reality TV President

https://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2019/11/lets-have-reality-tv-impeachment-for.html

Alan: In addition to David article about forcing hostile witnesses to testify, see Ross Douthat's "

How Trump Survives: 

The lesson of past impeachments might be that it takes disasters, not just scandals, to remove a president from office." Douthat's article

 is linked at the end of Leonhardt's commentary.

"A Needless Surrender"

By David Leonhardt Opinion Columnist

The Democrats have the law on their side, but they shouldn’t have waited so long to have this fight.

Yesterday, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration was legally obligated to cooperate with the impeachment inquiry. Impeachment is a constitutional process, and President Trump was trying to act like a king by not allowing administration officials to testify, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote.

But it’s not clear how much the ruling matters. The administration will appeal, and the case — which specifically involves Donald McGahn, the former White House counsel — likely won’t be resolved for weeks. If Democrats wait for the appeal process to finish, the country’s attention will have moved on from the revelations of the past two weeks.

This problem was not inevitable, though. House Democrats could have gone to court months before they did to fight the Trump administration’s intransigence. Trump has long refused to cooperate with congressional oversight, including after the release of the Mueller report this spring.

Instead, congressional Democrats waited to confront the administration — part of their larger failure to develop a clear strategy on the Russia scandal this summer.

As CNN’s Elie Honig, a former federal prosecutor, wrote yesterday: “It took [House Democrats] nearly four months after release of the Mueller Report to go to court on the McGahn issue. Imagine if they had gone to court after, say, only one month. We’d likely be done with appeals, or nearly so, by now.”

Likewise, Harry Litman, formerly the top federal prosecutor in western Pennsylvania, recently wrote in The Washington Post that Democrats “took so long to get off the dime.”

Had they acted more quickly, they might have found out more about Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine or at least forced top administration officials to refuse — in a much-watched hearing — to answer questions.

I’m not suggesting that a more aggressive approach by Democrats would have transformed the impeachment process. Both congressional Republicans and Republican voters seem willing to stick by Trump regardless of the facts.

But congressional Democrats should be cleareyed about what’s happening here: The president has little regard for the law. He is willing to break it if doing so benefits him.

Given that, Democrats should not be voluntarily surrendering any of their political or legal tools.

For more …

Judge Jackson: “Stated simply, the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings.” Litman: “[The administration’s] ‘absolute immunity’ claim is a kooky and newfangled concept essentially plucked out of thin air to keep McGahn, as well as former White House communications director Hope Hicks, from even showing up in Congress in the first place. But the administration’s submission is designed less to win in court,” than to “stall in the more important political arena.”

Laurence Tribe, Harvard Law School: “Judge Jackson rightly and predictably rejected Trump’s extreme claim that McGahn is absolutely immune from having to testify in response to a House subpoena because nobody is above the law. The tough issues of executive privilege remain.”

Joyce White Vance, a former top federal prosecutor in Alabama: “The ruling on McGahn isn’t a final one. It can be appealed to at least the Court of Appeals in D.C. If McGahn loses & doesn’t want to testify, he can keep fighting.

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DAVID’S MORNING NYT READ How Trump Survives The lesson of past impeachments might be that it takes disasters, not just scandals, to remove a president from office. By Ross Douthat