Kim Wehle: The House is making this fight too easy for Trump

Nor, more consequentially, does it absolve congressional Republicans, who have resorted to almost slapstick willful blindness in an attempt to let Trump off the hook for his clear extortion of personal favors and electoral interference from Ukraine. Some have insisted that other witnesses could exonerate Trump, without grappling with why the White House is refusing to allow them to testify. (If House Republicans truly believed this, they could pressure the administration to free the witnesses; Trump’s about-face on hosting the G7 summit shows that congressional GOP pressure can be effective.)

Finally, the president’s unprecedented stonewalling and refusal to cooperate with a lawful impeachment proceedings isn’t excused by the absence of court rulings affirming that this is wrong.

Nonetheless, the behavior of the courts—either deliberate or lackadaisical, depending on one’s interpretation—has been one of the most powerful forces in American politics during the Trump administration. Time and again since 2016, federal judges have been presented with novel arguments: that Trump can ban Muslims from entering the country; that he can reappropriate funds to pay for his border wall over Congress’s opposition; that he can’t be held accountable for accepting emoluments from foreign governments; that he is immune to criminal prosecutions and also to congressional investigations; that he could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue without consequence.

Quinta Jurecic and Ben Wittes: If the witnesses could exonerate Trump, why aren’t they testifying?

This is uncharted territory for federal courts, because no previous president has had the audacity to make such claims, though Trump’s actions are simply extensions of other, earlier assertions of executive privileges. It is not, however, uncharted for Trump, and in fact it is a road he knows well. During his private-sector career, Trump used lawsuits tactically. Even when it was clear that he or his company didn’t have a tenable position, they could buy time, raise the cost for his opponents, and generally bog things down to his advantage. By the time there was a ruling or a trial, the outcome might be effectively irrelevant to Trump.

The White House signaled early in the present Congress that it would use the same tactic to fight oversight. So far it’s been highly effective. Not that Trump is winning decisions—on the contrary, just as in some of the outlandish claims he’s made pre-impeachment, courts have tended to slap the administration down. But it doesn’t matter, because it’s eating up time ahead of the 2020 election. Trump could lose every one of the relevant cases at the Supreme Court, and it might not matter to him. The trick is to get to Election Day and hope voters choose him—if necessary, with the assistance of foreign governments whose arms have been twisted.