Where’s Thomas Jefferson when we need him?

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Where’s Thomas Jefferson when we need him? We ask because President Trump is appealing to the 2nd United States Circuit to try to protect his tax returns. This after a federal district judge ruled that the President’s accountant has to hand over the returns against a subpoena in a penny ante criminal case launched by a Democratic district attorney in Manhattan pursuing a political agenda.

This is the kind of thing President Jefferson was warning against when, in 1807, he opposed trying to subpoena a president. He marked the point in a letter to a lawyer in Virginia, George Hay. “The leading principle of our Constitution is the independence of the Legislature, executive and judiciary of each other, and none are more jealous of this than the judiciary.”

“But,” warned the inspiriter of what became the Democratic Party, “would the executive be independent of the judiciary, if he were subject to the commands of the latter, & to imprisonment for disobedience; if the several courts could bandy him from pillar to post, keep him constantly trudging from north to south & east to west, and withdraw him entirely from his constitutional duties?”

Jefferson’s logic was not that the President is above the law but that the Constitution is the law. He made particular reference to the unique aspect of the presidency. If the “Constitution enjoins on a particular officer to be always engaged in a particular set of duties imposed on him, does not this supersede the general law, subjecting him to minor duties inconsistent with these?”

To Jefferson the president is unique because “the Constitution enjoins his constant agency in the concerns of” the millions of Americans. “Is the law paramount to this, which calls on him on behalf of a single one?” Yet the district Judge who sent Mr. Trump scrambling to the Second Circuit doesn’t have much truck with such objections, though he takes thousands of words to say so.

In short, the district judge thinks the President ought to be able to accomodate the court. As a final insult, the judge reckons that over-ruling the President is in the “public interest,” notwithstanding — or even mentioning — the fact that voters lofted Mr. Trump to office because, at least in part, he was the only candidate with the kishkes to refuse to make his tax returns public.

It’s a remarkable fact that all this is taking place in the shadow of a campaign to impeach the President. We don’t doubt but that the urgency with which the district attorney in New York is pursuing Mr. Trump’s tax returns is animated by the hope that the filings will contain some nugget onto which Speaker Pelosi can glom if her mission in Ukraine fails. Enable the maneuver here and there’ll be no end to it, just as Jefferson warned.

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Image: Drawing by Elliott Banfield, courtesy of the artist.


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