Rarely does a week pass without a federal judge ruling against President Donald Trump in one case or another. Last week, the president faced defeats on two fronts. A federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled that the House could obtain Trump’s records from his longtime accounts. Then a federal judge in California halted his efforts to redirect federal funds to build his border wall without congressional approval.

In each case, the judges spurned Trump’s extreme views of presidential power and his warped depiction of events. This isn’t surprising in and of itself. The lower federal courts have routinely seen past the administration’s smokescreens on cases ranging from the Muslim ban to the Census’ citizenship question. I noted last month that the Supreme Court has often vindicated Trump by embracing his pretextual justifications and alternative histories. The latest slate of rulings shows how the lower federal courts are still capable of seeing through his smokescreens—and, by contrast, highlights the Supreme Court’s inability to do so.

In the D.C. lawsuit, Trump filed a challenge last month to block a House Oversight Committee subpoena for accounting firm Mazars USA. William Consovoy, one of the president’s private attorneys, cast the president as the hapless victim of an “all-out political war” by the “Democrat Party.” He told the court that the subpoena lacked a “legitimate legislative purpose” to inquire into Trump’s finances and that their efforts usurped on the executive branch’s law-enforcement powers.

“Instead of working with the president to pass bipartisan legislation that would actually benefit Americans, House Democrats are singularly obsessed with finding something they can use to damage the president politically,” he argued in the initial complaint in April. He also made the extraordinary argument that Congress could not investigate whether the president (or anyone else, for that matter) had committed a crime because that was the role of the executive and judicial branches. During oral arguments earlier this month, Consovoy told Judge Amit Mehta that Congress’ inquiries into Watergate and Whitewater had been unconstitutional.

The judge took a different view of congressional oversight: “It is simply not fathomable that a Constitution that grants Congress the power to remove a president for reasons including criminal behavior would deny Congress the power to investigate him for unlawful conduct—past or present—even without formally opening an impeachment inquiry.” Though Consovoy argued the investigations into Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton had violated the separation of powers, Mehta concluded that those sagas supported the House’s case now. “Congress plainly views itself as having sweeping authority to investigate illegal conduct of a president, before and after taking office,” he explained. “This court is not prepared to roll back the tide of history.”