The Crux of the Biscuit
by tristero
Here’s your problem, right in a nutshell:
In a 2004 law review article, “The Limits on Congress’s Authority to Investigate the President,” Professor Marshall, who served in the Clinton White House, wrote that congressional investigations “provide a president’s opponents with considerable opportunity to engage in political mischief.”
In an interview, Professor Marshall said House Democrats should act cautiously.
“Congressional investigations obviously can be used purely as a tactic to harass or to divert a presidency from pursuing its agenda,” he said. “There has to be some sort of measured responsibility from the investigators. The Democrats have to make sure that what they’re doing really is soundly based in legitimate government reasons and not just a desire to inflict distraction on the presidency.”
Mr. Trump’s lawyers, in seeking to block a subpoena to his accounting firm, describe House Democrats as engaged in a “political war.”
“Instead of working with the president to pass bipartisan legislation that would actually benefit Americans,” the lawyers wrote in a lawsuit filed last month, “House Democrats are singularly obsessed with finding something they can use to damage the president politically. They have issued more than 100 subpoenas and requests to anyone with even the most tangential connection to the president.”
You read that right. Democrats are being urged to proceed “cautiously.” But Republicans have no such compunction. They’re blunt, direct, and bullying.
Let’s be clear: acting cautiously against Trump is a strategy bound to fail. By forcefully and intelligently, Democrats might actually be able to save at least a part of our democracy.
Adam Liptak is a great, knowledgeable, and intelligent reporter, all rarities, and I mean to cast no aspersions on him. But once, just once, in one of of these judicious mainstream analyses, it would nice if a reporter would dig up a mainstream Republican strategist urging caution when dealing with Democrats.
And a mainstream Democratic strategist who’s telling Democrats to take the gloves off.