Professor Rozell, of George Mason University, took questions from the public this afternoon, and amongst his responses, said: "Executive privilege is not an absolute power. The courts have made it clear that when Congress or the courts demand information and the president claims executivie privilege, there has to be a balancing of the needs of the different branches. A president's claim of EP may have to yield to other needs in our system of separated powers. In the current controversy I think it is necessary that members of Congress who are seeking testimony make a strong case that they cannot properly conduct an investigation without such testimony, and therefore that their needs trump the asserted need for presidential secrecy. In our system there is a string presumption in favor of Congress's right to investigate and thus the president has to make the case that divulging information would cause some harm to the public good.
It is very important to recognize that EP exists to protect the needs of the public, not the political interests of a president and his staff."
Rozell believes that the President may want this to go to the Supreme Court so that he could claim total victory for the Executive Branch, and the expansion of presidential powers. (This sounds like a Dick Cheney power-trip to me.) And he wonders aloud what this would mean to the system of checks and balances, and to oversight, if the President were to win this battle in the stacked conservative Supreme Court. I can only hope that the justices would not vote in a partisan manner, and would be true conservatives, not wanting to change the system of checks and balances that have worked so well for more than 200 years. Can you imagine what the conservative justices would say if a Hillary Clinton were in office and tried to do whatever she wanted behind the veil of executive privilege? We have to do more than think in a partisan manner, here. It can work both ways. We need to protect our democracy.
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