Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: First Draft
Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet.
We begin today with the former associate White House counsel to President Ronald Reagan, Alan Charles Raul, writing for The Hill that if the notion of “presidential immunity” was not invoked for the Iran-contra affair, then it should not be invoked now.
After listening to two and half hours of oral argument in the Donald Trump immunity case, it is perfectly clear what the Supreme Court should decide: namely, as little as possible. [...]
In what’s known as the Iran-Contra affair, conduct involving unmistakable official foreign policy powers of the president was subjected to intense criminal scrutiny; that affair actually concerned selling arms to Iran in exchange for American hostages as part of a presidentially authorized covert action as well as funding the Nicaraguan Contras to carry out a key element of President Reagan’s anti-Marxist foreign policy agenda.
Invoking presidential immunity was off the table in Iran-Contra — both in the public mind and in the White House. Success for White House lawyers was ending up with a client who was neither impeached nor indicted — which is how it turned out. In contrast, it notably did not work out well for prior, politically motivated president who invoked presidential immunity to avoid producing tape recordings from the Oval Office: Nixon in Watergate. He failed in the Supreme Court, where the justices famously rejected his claim to an “absolute, unqualified Presidential privilege of immunity from judicial process under all circumstances.”
So, why should the Supreme Court now engage in minute parsing of various hypothetical circumstances that might or might not warrant plenary or partial presidential immunity?
Now that I think about it, if there were a case for what we now call “presidential immunity”, the Iran-contra scandal would probably check all the boxes.
Mr. Raul’s essay also has a strong whiff of “I wish we had thought of that” to it.