OPINION
Mark Meadows, who recently revealed that Donald Trump tested positive for the coronavirus before the first 2020 debate without telling its organizers, is frantically atoning for his momentary lapse of loyalty. Trump’s former chief of staff just filed a new lawsuit designed to help Trump cover up his coup attempt.
The lawsuit — which targets the House select committee examining the Jan. 6 riot — is ludicrous. And this saga would be darkly comic, but for this: The suit makes an argument that ultimately demonstrates why Republicans are all but certain to refuse to participate in protecting our democracy from another coup attempt in the future.
We cannot let it become normalized that much of the GOP has coalesced around the idea that Trump’s effort to overthrow U.S. democracy — first through corrupt pressure on government officials, then through mob violence — does not merit a national reckoning or policy response of any kind.
But this core idea is central to Meadows’s lawsuit, and indeed to the broader legal attack on the Jan. 6 committee that is coming from Trump himself.
Meadows is suing the committee over its subpoenas for extensive documents from Meadows and others. He wants the court to toss out subpoenas, which would keep buried untold new details about Trump’s coup attempt.
One of Meadows’s core arguments is that the subpoena, and the committee’s activities, lack a “legitimate legislative purpose.” The suit notes that if this can be established, the subpoena is invalid.
But that’s nonsense. There are many valid legislative purposes driving the committee’s investigation.
Legislative responses to Trump’s plot
For instance, committee members are already saying they may recommend revising the Electoral Count Act (ECA) of 1887, which governs how Congress counts presidential electors.
The Meadows subpoena is plainly seeking information that could inform that goal. As his own suit notes, it demands communications and documents about efforts to invalidate the congressional count of electors, and about the vice president’s role in presiding over that.
Obviously those could shed light on how Meadows, Trump and their co-conspirators sought to exploit ambiguities in the ECA to subvert Joe Biden’s electors on illegitimate grounds (like invented claims of fraud) and to get Trump’s vice president to assist that.
This could illuminate how exactly those ECA ambiguities invited bad actors to attempt this plot, and how those might be fixed. These are exactly the sorts of things that ECA reform would do. So informing that is a legitimate legislative purpose.
Similarly, the committee has informed Meadows that it wants to question him about efforts by him, Trump or others to pressure the Justice Department to launch investigations and issue statements casting doubt on the election’s outcome. This was apparently designed to create the phony pretext to subvert those electors in Congress.
Here again, there’s an obvious legislative purpose. Democrats want to pass reforms that would tighten up oversight on communications between the White House and the Justice Department, to prevent such corrupt manipulation of law enforcement in the future.
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Any further revelations about how Trump and his co-conspirators pressured the department might display how current processes facilitate such corrupt communications, and how reform might prevent that in the future.
So that’s two valid legislative purposes. There are others, such as countering domestic terrorism and strengthening Capitol security.
‘Sheer nonsense’
Meadows’s suit also claims the committee has not specified exactly which legislative purposes it’s pursuing, rendering the subpoena invalid. But constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe says there’s nothing in the Constitution or court precedent supporting this.
“The idea that a congressional committee’s investigation must explicitly declare its legislative purpose if its subpoenas are to be honored is sheer nonsense,” Tribe told me.
What’s more, the idea doesn’t make any sense on its face: The point of such congressional investigations is to determine what legislative fixes are needed through the process of inquiry .
“It would put the cart before the horse,” Tribe continued, “to insist that a committee of Congress investigating an extraordinary event threatening the survival of the republic and the operations of Congress must spell out in advance what kinds of laws it might need to enact to prevent a repeat of that tragic occurrence.”
Now let’s consider the bigger idea that Meadows’s claims advance. It’s that after all that has happened, protecting the process of concluding our elections from corruption and beefing up oversight of potential White House manipulation of law enforcement are not legitimate legislative purposes.
In other words, in response to this full-scale attack on our political order, we should do nothing meaningful to protect our system against another one.
Making another coup attempt more likely
A big question is whether 10 Republican senators might support either ECA reform, or tightening oversight of White House-Justice Department communications, or both. As hopeless as that seems, it’s not impossible.
But with Trump and Meadows building their defenses on the idea that those things are not valid legislative purposes — on the idea that the effort to overthrow our political system was defensible or even just, and not a major, historically important act of wrongdoing that requires a serious national policy response — that becomes even less likely.
“If Trump comes out with that message, then those congressional Republicans will feel constrained not to cooperate with the Democrats even on forward-looking reforms,” congressional scholar Josh Chafetz told me.
Which, of course, only makes a future coup attempt more likely to be attempted, and perhaps even to succeed.
Greg Sargent writes The Plum Line blog. He joined The Post in 2010, after stints at Talking Points Memo, New York Magazine and the New York Observer.
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