Opinion | Supreme Court Have to Force Trump to Comply With Congress?

President Donald Trump's refusal to hand over records to Congress and allow executive branch employees to provide information and testimony to Congress during the impeachment battle is the strongest test yet of legal principles that over the past 200 years have not yet been fully defined by U.S. courts.

It's not the first test: Struggles over power among the political branches predate our Constitution. The framers chose not to, and probably could not, fully resolve them.

And federal judges have been reluctant to weigh in when presidents refuse to share information with Congress. From 1789 until Trump's inauguration in 2017, federal courts had only considered five cases in which the president claimed executive privilege in response to a congressional subpoena.

Judges believed that the framers intended for the political branches to resolve such conflicts through negotiation.

"Each branch should take cognizance of an implicit constitutional mandate to seek optimal accommodation," wrote the D.C. circuit court in 1977.

In other words: the political branches should be able to compromise and work it out on their own.
 

Separation of powers

The courts' reluctantly started to intervene in power struggles between the president and Congress in 1973, when President Richard Nixon asserted absolute presidential immunity – or what's called "executive privilege" – in response to a congressional subpoena to hand over tapes related to the Watergate scandal.

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