The Supreme Court's Final Exam by Linda Greenhouse
'How the justices rule on three cases involving Trump’s financial records will tell us all we need to know about the court.
When the first two of President Trump’s appeals seeking to shield his financial records from disclosure reached the Supreme Court last month, I predicted that the justices would take their institutional interests into account and turn the cases down.
I was wrong.
And on reflection, now that the court has agreed to hear those two appeals plus a third, I’m glad I was wrong. Here’s why: The eventual decisions, to come in the months after the as-yet unscheduled arguments in late March or early April, will give the country much-needed clarity about the Supreme Court. With the court in the full glare of an election-year spotlight, we will learn beyond any doubt what kind of Supreme Court we have — and whether its evolution into partnership with a president who acts as if he owns it is now complete.
Those of us who have been warning about this evolution are well aware that it’s a contested claim, subject to ready dismissal as overstatement or ideologically driven fearmongering. So I want to make the case here that for the justices to do anything other than affirm the three decisions at issue by two Courts of Appeals would be to vindicate both the warnings and the president’s disturbing assumption.
The fact is that these cases are not what the president’s lawyers have dressed them up to be. This is not Congress or the federal courts putting the president in the dock. No, that was United States v. Nixon, the Watergate tapes case, in which the court under a conservative chief justice, Warren Burger, who had been named to the court by Mr. Nixon, unanimously rejected the president’s claim of privilege against releasing records of intimate Oval Office conversations for use by a special prosecutor in a criminal trial.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/19/opinion/trump-tax-supreme-court.html
