Have Democrats forgotten the Constitution?

Senate Democrats are backing the demand of Christine Blasey Ford’s lawyer that her client not be questioned until the FBI investigates her charge that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh assaulted her some time in the early 1980s. Leave aside for a moment that there’s not much to investigate — she has forgotten key details and has not alleged that there are contemporaneous witnesses other than Kavanaugh and another individual, who has denied that anything of the sort happened. There is no constitutional warrant for the investigation they seek.

As Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley pointed out in his letter to his Democratic colleagues on the committee, “the Constitution assigns the Senate, and only the Senate, with the task of advising the president on his nominees and consenting if the circumstances merit. We have no power to commandeer an Executive Branch agency into conducting our [emphasis in the original] due dlligence. The job of assessing a nominee’s qualifications in order to decide whether to consent to the nomination is ours, and ours alone.”

The Senate, an Article I institution, does not have the power to exercise Article II powers.

In another case, congressional Democrats — the party’s minority leaders in both chambers and its ranking members of the two intelligence committees — are demanding that the FBI and the CIA not declassify documents pertaining to investigations or charges of Russian collusion by the Trump campaign or the Trump White House, as the president has ordered them to do. Instead, the Democrats insist that Democrats should examine the declassifications before they are made public.

They go further: “President Trump and the White House should not be given access to sensitive law enforcement information related to an ongoing federal investigation examining conduct by the president, his campaign, or his associates.” But does anyone doubt that the president is authorized under legislation passed by Congress to declassify classified information? And does anyone know of legislation that bars him from doing so until the leaders of the minority party in Congress approve of the specific declassifications? The quoted sentence above suggests that the Democrats think he should be treated, on this issue, as if he has been already impeached by the House and removed from office by the Senate.

Once again, Democrats are demanding that members of Congress, an Article I institution, have the authority to exercise Article II powers.