"Trump isn't just defying Congress. He's rejecting the whole idea of oversight."

The stakes in the current showdown are higher than a few subpoenas.
By Steve Vladeck
Steve Vladeck is a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, co-editor in chief of Just Security, co-host of the National Security Law Podcast and a CNN legal analyst.

The administration’s emerging position appears to be that Congress does not really have the power to investigate the president, at least not when one chamber is controlled by his political adversaries, even if whatever information it seeks might eventually be used in an impeachment proceeding. That’s a deeply disturbing argument, and one that, if successful, would tilt the separation of powers, perhaps irrevocably, toward the executive branch.

Several fights between the administration and the House seemed to boil over this past week. The Justice Department has said the official who oversees its civil rights division won’t give a deposition to a House committee investigating the administration’s plan to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census. The White House blocked another official, who handles security clearances, from testifying before a different panel looking into that work. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has missed deadlines to provide Trump’s tax returns to the House Ways and Means Committee, which has requested them as permitted by statute; Mnuchin says he’ll decide next month whether to comply. Trump also sued the chairman of the House Oversight Committee (as well as his own accounting firm) to try to quash a subpoena the panel issued for financial information related to Trump’s businesses.

There is no question that the power of inquiry has limits. As the Supreme Court explained in 1957, “No inquiry is an end in itself; it must be related to, and in furtherance of, a legitimate task of the Congress. Investigations conducted solely for the personal aggrandizement of the investigators or to ‘punish’ those investigated are indefensible.” Supporters of the president might point to this language as proof that any subpoena issued by the current House is invalid, because it’s clearly part of a “witch hunt” against Trump.

This argument doesn’t remotely follow. No one disputes that one of the most important tasks that the Constitution commits to Congress is the power to impeach and remove federal officers for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/trump-isnt-just-defying-congress-hes-rejecting-the-whole-idea-of-oversight/2019/04/26/acf0a00a-67c9-11e9-a1b6-b29b90efa879_story.html?utm_term=.8eaee25cd542