In another ongoing saga of this administration attacking and looking to destroy the “administrative state,” the Justice Department’s shady Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) — the same office which justified torture among many spurious secret legal opinions which FGI agrees should be publicly accessible! — released (on April 1 of all days!!) an opinion that the Presidential Records Act (PRA) is “unconstitutional.” The non-profit watchdog American Oversight, along with the American Historical Association, have argued that the PRA is settled law that assures the preservation of the historical record and that presidential records belong to the public, not any individual president.
And, in perhaps the most obvious pushback against this tenuously legal OLC opinion, a few days ago the Congressional Research Service (CRS) released Congressional Authority to Regulate Presidential Recordkeeping which explains the history of the PRA and substantive counterarguments to the OLC Position. Read on and stay tuned!
“Today’s hearing is about a simple principle: Presidential records belong to the American people, not to any one president. For nearly half a century, no administration of either party has challenged the constitutionality of the Presidential Records Act until now.
“What the Trump administration is attempting now is a dramatic break from well-settled law and history, and an affront to the basic understanding that presidential records belong to the public. By claiming the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional — and that the president alone can decide what to keep, what to hide, and what to destroy — the administration is advancing a sweeping view of presidential power that guts transparency, undermines accountability, and eviscerates the historical record itself.
“This case is about far more than record-keeping. It’s about whether the president can unilaterally place his actions beyond public scrutiny. If records documenting the president’s most consequential decisions, internal deliberations, or abuses of power can be hidden, deleted, or never preserved in the first place, the public loses one of our democracy’s most important safeguards.”
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