A ruling from a federal judge this week has emboldened House Democrats to step up their legal challenges against President Donald Trump and his cronies, including Attorney General Bill Barr, for refusing to obey congressional subpoenas.
In a devastating blow to Trump’s ego and abuse of executive power, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson ordered former White House counsel Don McGahn to comply with a subpoena House Democrats issued earlier this year in an effort to gather testimony concerning Trump’s multiple obstruction of justice crimes as detailed in the final Russia investigation report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
Brown’s ruling makes it clear that the president is not all-powerful, and that by preventing former and current administration officials from testifying, they are violating their oath to the Constitution and the nation.
“Stated simply, the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings,” Jackson wrote. “It is indisputable that current and former employees of the White House work for the People of the United States, and that they take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
And so, McGahn must testify, and the Supreme Court must uphold this ruling or they would be effectively claiming that the president is a king, something that would horrify the Founding Fathers and destroy any notion that the conservative justices are so-called “originalists”.
In response to the ruling, House Oversight Committee chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) announced that further lawsuits have been filed against Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross for also failing to comply with subpoenas, and those lawsuits will likely have the same outcome in court.
“President Trump and his aides are not above the law,” Maloney said in a statement, “I am filing this enforcement action today because the Trump Administration’s brazen obstruction of Congress must not stand.”
Maloney is seeking documents related to a racist citizenship question Trump has been forcefully trying to insert in the upcoming census, a move that could result in millions of people not being counted, thus tipping even more power to Republicans.
This ruling and the subsequent lawsuits by Democrats could not have come at a worse time for Trump as the impeachment inquiry against him continues full steam ahead, and as Democrats now seek to include his obstruction of the Russia investigation in the hearings, McGahn’s testimony could be the last nail in his coffin that seals the case and buries him.
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