Of the many dog-and-pony shows currently mid-performance in and around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, The Interview Negotiations are among the more farcical. The crack legal team representing Donald J. Trump, American president, are continually going back and forth with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's squad over the terms of a potential interview with their client. Most recently, Trump's team argued he should not have to answer any questions about obstruction of justice, one of the key points of inquiry in the probe. This has been going on for months.

It seems incredibly unlikely that Trump will ever sit across the table from Robert Mueller or anyone in his team of seasoned federal prosecutors. Trump's record testifying under oath—usually when he is deposed as part of one of the seemingly endless parade of lawsuits he's been involved in—is not good.

He tends to go galavanting through the rollicking fields of his own mind, rally-style, with a significant risk that he gives away the whole ballgame. In 2016, he derailed a Trump University lawsuit deposition into a discussion of his success in the Republican primary. He does not do much reading and is often ill-prepared for intricate lines of questioning. This is, after all, a guy who already told NBC's Lester Holt on national television that when he fired FBI Director James Comey, he was considering "this Russia thing."

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So it seems far more likely that Trump's team never agrees to an interview. At that point, the question becomes whether the special counsel will serve the president with a subpoena in an attempt to compel him to come to the table. As Trump's TV super-lawyer Rudy Giuliani made clear to The Washington Post on Wednesday, that will be another ordeal:

“We would move to quash the subpoena,” Giuliani said in an interview. “And we’re pretty much finished with our memorandum opposing a subpoena.” Giuliani added that Trump’s attorneys are ready to “argue it before the Supreme Court, if it ever got there.”

In recent weeks, Giuliani said members of Trump’s team have “had conversations” with Emmet T. Flood, a White House lawyer working on issues related to the federal investigation. He said Flood “would have a big role to play here and would assert presidential privilege” but declined to say more about those discussions.

So it is increasingly possible that a major decision in an investigation into the president will be put in the hands of the Supreme Court. You might remember the Supreme Court is also in the news for another reason: as Politico reminds us, the president's pick to fill the seat vacated by Anthony Kennedy is set to start his confirmation hearings right after Labor Day.

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's Senate confirmation hearings will start on Sept. 4 and last between three and four days, Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) announced on Friday.

That scheduling tees up the GOP to meet its goal of getting President Donald Trump's pick seated on the high court by the time its term begins in early October, barring unforeseen obstacles or a breakthrough by Democrats who are pushing to derail Kavanaugh's confirmation.

So the president's hand-picked justice could be seated on the Court by October, when the court's term begins. Presumably, that will be in time to provide the deciding vote on the question of whether the president who put him there can be compelled to testify. Moreover, what are the chances this is the last legal battle in the Russia probe that could come before the Court?

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The man Kavanaugh will replace, Anthony Kennedy, was often (with varying accuracy) described as the court's Swing Vote. But Kavanaugh was a right-wing political operative who worked for Clinton special prosecutor Kenneth Starr and President George W. Bush before Bush nominated him to the federal bench. He would swing the court in a decisively conservative direction. And more than that, his views on whether the president should be subject to special investigations has somewhat evolved over time.

A lot of the controversy over Kavanaugh's nomination thus far has focused on Congressional Republicans' refusal to wait for a full review of his extensive paper trail in politics and the judiciary before holding hearings on his confirmation. Those are legitimate concerns, particularly as Kavanaugh could also provide the decisive vote in, say, striking down Roe v. Wade, or otherwise chipping away at abortion rights.

But this week's verification that some dimensions of the Trump-Russia investigation will likely be settled by the Supreme Court presents perhaps a more fundamental issue. Should the president, unlike other citizens of a free society under the rule of law, be permitted to pick his own judge or jury? Or, alternately: should the president be permitted to make a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land when he is under federal investigation?

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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