Guest Blog: In Response to White House Refusal to Co-operate with Congressional Inquiries.

You may want to start here: Read the White House Letter in Response to the Impeachment Inquiry. It’s the NY Times link to the letter to the Congressional committees from the White House. It’s a long read but worth it.

And here is a clear and concise reply from Milwaukee attorney Jeremy Levinson. This is reprinted with his permission:

If the law didn’t make it a crime to direct people to ignore subpoenas, practicing law would be a lot more fun. But it’s a crime.

Some circumstances present nuance and subtlety. Some don’t. The White House’s refusal to provide information to the House as part of the impeachment inquiry and its orders to individuals to ignore subpoenas fall in the latter category.

The Constitution gives congress both oversight and impeachment authority. Unambiguous. And these by definition are not subject to Presidential approval, whim, or agreement. After years of fake GOP hysteria about President Obama acting beyond his authority, for the first time in history a White House has simply said that it won’t be subject to either. And that it will ignore congressional process, i.e., subpoenas.

This is straightforward and unarguable. The White House is violating the Constitution and statutes of the United States without any basis other than the President’s notion of his personal interests. It is astonishing.

Likewise, directing others to ignore subpoenas is as classic and plain a case of criminal obstruction as there is.

On its own, today’s insane White House proclamation provides more than ample reasons to impeach. It was a formal declaration of an imperial White House subject to no oversight or rules or any other government structure established (by) the Constitution and laws. It sure as hell isn’t American.

After Nixon, Congress established legal protections against an imperial presidency. They’ve all been bulldozed and Trump has taken the White House far closer to totally unaccountable supremacy and lawlessness than did Nixon.

And the GOP in Congress which spent eight years savaging Obama for doing anything, calling him a dictator, has been nothing but a cheerleader for Trump and this terrifically dangerous re-organization of the federal government.

For most of my life, I believed at the end of the day if things got really insane and dangerous the adults in government would stand up and refuse to let it happen. Boy howdy, (was) I wrong. Apparently if we had a president who refused to comply with the law or answer to Congress and he was obsessed with war on oh, say, Canada, the GOP would go along with it and protect him so long as he wore the right jersey. And the fact is we know this is true to the point of doing terrible damage to the country and to a great many people.

originally appeared on Facebook

So there you have some factual background and another view on what is happening in our country…from someone who is a lot more versed in the law than I.