Andrew McCarthy: Obstruction of Congress impeachment article is absolutely frivolous
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Honor a congressional subpoena to appear at President Trump’s (presumably eventual) Senate impeachment trial? Joe Biden, still the odds-on favorite to be the Democrats’ standard-bearer in the 2020 election, scoffed at the very idea: No way!
The former vice president’s knee-jerk obstinacy illuminates — we should say, provides even more illumination of — the patent farce that is the second article of impeachment passed by the House on a strict party-line vote: the accusation that the president has obstructed Congress. As we saw in a committee hearing, featuring the spectacle of staffers questioning staffers with no actual fact witnesses in sight, Democrats have no problem when Democrats blow off congressional demands for information. “Obstruction” is a one-way street.
Trump regards the impeachment inquiry as a partisan witch hunt, just the latest phase of the Democrats’ project to remove him, which began even before his term started. He certainly has a point, although that is not a good reason to give his opponents fuel for the project, as he did by pressuring Ukraine to investigate Biden. That is the allegation in the first article of impeachment. Under the circumstances, I believe it falls well short of the egregious misconduct for which impeachment should be reserved; it was, nevertheless, a foolish thing for the president to do.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Let’s focus, though, on the second impeachment article, obstruction of Congress.
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{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}The president directed his underlings and executive branch components not to comply with congressional demands for information. To be clear, Congress has undeniable constitutional authority, broad in scope, to conduct oversight of the executive branch.
The president, with all the authority of a peer branch of government, has extensive privileges of confidentiality, rooted in Article II, particularly when it comes to communications with his staff and high executive officials. Congress, however, is empowered to probe, especially when its concern is presidential malfeasance, or the activities of executive branch agencies Congress has created — such agencies, after all, are led by officers subject to Senate confirmation, and Congress both underwrites them with taxpayer funds and limits their operations by statute.
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