Are President Trump and his lawyers heading into a legal ambush before the riders of the District of Columbia Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals? A court order issued late Tuesday is a warning sign for Mr. Trump’s effort to shield his papers from the scrutiny of the Congressional committee investigating the events of January 6 — a case that could endanger not only Mr. Trump but future presidents seeking safety in the doctrine of separated powers.

Tuesday’s order in effect asks Mr. Trump to explain why the court should even consider the case. That suggests the three circuit riders on the panel are content with a lower court’s ruling for the January 6 committee. They point to the Presidential Records Act. If a president claims public release of papers “violates the former President’s rights or privileges,” the law assigns review of the question to the district court for the District of Columbia.

It was a district judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, who ruled that presidential conversations “are presumptively privileged, but the privilege is not absolute.” She reckons that the privilege “can be overcome by an appropriate showing of public need by the judicial or legislative branch.” That was a green light for the Congressional Democrats who are pressing to peruse Mr. Trump’s presidential papers, a violation that he and his lawyers have condemned as a “vexatious, illegal fishing expedition.”

Separated powers is at the heart of Mr. Trump’s legal case. The materials demanded by Congress “stem from a rival branch with incentives to use the records requests for ‘institutional advantage’,” Mr. Trump’s lawyers said. By granting the January 6 committee these records, Judge Chutkan’s ruling “effectively strips any former president of their constitutional and statutory rights to seek judicial review and would allow congress to conduct limitless partisan investigations into a former president.”

Considering such stakes, it’s a moment to revisit remarks concerning “the independent judiciary” by the Chief Justice of the United States, John Roberts. That was three years ago, when he tried to palm off on our noble public the idea that, as he put it, “we do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”

“Sorry, Chief Justice John Roberts,” Mr. Trump replied, “but you do indeed have ‘Obama judges,’ and they have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country.” Mr. Trump’s complaint then related to a border security case, but it’s a feature of modern politics that judges nominated by Democrats do indeed have a “different point of view” than Republican nominees in respect of Constitutional interpretation.

Unfortunately for Mr. Trump, his current case is, at least for the moment, in the hands of jurists nominated by Democrats, not merely at the district court, to which Judge Chutkan was nominated by President Obama, but also at the appeals court, where two of the panelists for Tuesday’s hearing, Judges Patricia Millett and Robert Wilkins, are also nominees of Mr. Obama and the third, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, of President Biden.

For our part, we’re less concerned with the party affiliation of the judges than with the fact that the circuit court seems to be focused on the Presidential Records Act, as opposed to the constitutional parchment to which they’re sworn. The key point is that the power Congress granted to the National Archives is not the legislative branch’s to give away. Separated powers was established by the states when they ratified the Constitution.

That doctrine was articulated in Massachusetts’ Constitution, which stressed that none of the three branches of government shall exercise the power of another, to ensure “a government of laws and not of men.” Executive privilege has been fundamental to the Presidency since it was claimed by George Washington himself in his fracas with Congress over the Jay Treaty. It never ceases to amaze us that parties vying for the presidency spend so much time trying to hamstring its future occupants.

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Image: Portrait of John Adams in pastel on paper by Benjamin Blyth, circa 1766. From the Massachusetts Historical Society via Wikipedia.