Michelle Goldberg: If This Is a Constitutional Crisis, Act Like It
Source: New York Times
If This Is a Constitutional Crisis, Act Like It
Democrats in Congress need to deploy all their powers, including impeachment.
By Michelle Goldberg
Opinion Columnist
May 9, 2019
In their best-selling 2018 book “How Democracies Die,” the Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote about the concept of “constitutional hardball,” in which politicians “deploy their institutional powers as broadly as they can get away with.” One example they gave was the way that Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan president, responded when the opposition party won control of the country’s legislature in a landslide 2015 election. To thwart his political enemies, Maduro turned to the Venezuelan supreme court, which was packed with loyalists, and which “effectively incapacitated” the legislature by striking down most of its bills. The letter of the law was maintained even as the system was subverted.
Now a clash between an autocratic president who disdains democratic norms and a chamber of the legislature controlled by the opposition is playing out in the United States. Donald Trump has said that he intends to fight all congressional subpoenas. The House Judiciary Committee just voted to recommend that Attorney General Bill Barr be held in contempt after Barr ignored a deadline to produce documents from the investigation of Robert Mueller, the special counsel. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is blatantly refusing to comply with the law requiring him to turn Trump’s tax returns over to the House Ways and Means Committee. Former White House Counsel Don McGahn is refusing to comply with a House subpoena, and Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. has signaled that he might not cooperate with a subpoena from the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Some have argued that this isn’t yet a constitutional crisis because Congress’s constitutional remedies haven’t been exhausted; it can still turn to the courts to enforce its prerogatives. That’s little comfort for many Democrats, who despair of a fair hearing before our Supreme Court, whose conservative majority includes two judges chosen by Trump in part for their expansive view of executive power. But however you define constitutional crisis, there’s no question we’re in a moment of constitutional hardball. So far, however, only Republicans really seem to be playing.
At a Thursday news conference, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that a constitutional crisis has begun. “The administration has decided they are not going to honor their oath of office,” she said, echoing Representative Jerry Nadler, Democratic chairman of the Judiciary Committee. In addition to Barr, Pelosi said the House could hold others in contempt. Yet she repeated the Democratic refrain that the House needs to engage in further investigation rather than impeachment. “What we want to do is get the facts, we want to do it in a way that is the least divisive to our country,” she said.
Pelosi is a sharp and pragmatic woman, and her evident belief that impeachment carries strategic risks for Democrats should be taken seriously. But it is incoherent to argue that Trump constitutes an existential threat to the Constitution, and that Congress should wait to use the Constitution’s primary defense against such a threat. Democratic fear of divisiveness — even as Republicans gleefully embrace it — is leading to unilateral political disarmament.
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Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/opinion/constitutional-crisis-trump-pelosi.html