Trump is wrong: House’s actions aren’t ‘presidential harassment’

For some weeks, President Donald Trump has been in a swivet about “presidential harassment” — or, as the practice is more commonly known, congressional oversight of the executive branch. He was up before dawn Thursday, tweeting that the House Intelligence Committee’s new inquiry into his financial dealings with foreign actors constituted “Unlimited Presidential Harassment.”

So perturbed is Trump by any effort to hold him accountable that he used his State of the Union speech to complain of what he called “ridiculous, partisan investigations,” warning, “If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation. It just doesn’t work that way!”

This is precisely how it works — how it has to work, in fact.

A president whose administration does not have the confidence of the people cannot govern effectively, or legitimately. Accountability is crucial to that confidence — something the nation’s founders grasped, even if Trump does not.

Or, as Richard Nixon put it in 1973, “People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has spent much time of late giving Trump lessons in governing and adulting, moved to clarify the concept: “It’s not investigation; it’s oversight,” she noted Wednesday. “It’s our congressional responsibility, and if we didn’t do it, we would be delinquent in our duties.”

Exposing corruption and malfeasance in the Trump administration promises to be a heavy lift. But Pelosi & Co. have long been preparing to dig into questions about such things as: the separation of migrant families at the southern border; the use of military personnel at the border; relief efforts in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria; the rollback of environmental regulations; the financial and legal undermining of Obamacare.

On Thursday, the Ways and Means Committee opened hearings aimed at paving the — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi

way for the demand of Trump’s tax returns, which, if made public, could open a dozen new lines of inquiry, including whether the president is using his office for personal gain.

That is neither ridiculous nor partisan. Not that presidential harassment isn’t a real concern. One need only look back at the Obama era to see how oversight can be hijacked by partisan zeal. Remember Operation Fast and Furious? Solyndra? Politics at the IRS?

Whatever legitimate concerns arose from these probes got lost in the mad-dog antics of Darrell Issa, then the chairman of the House Oversight Committee. Issa went so overboard in his crusade to destroy Barack Obama that he rendered his committee a partisan joke, alienating even fellow Republicans.

And who can forget the multiyear investigation of the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya? The House Republican leader, Kevin Mccarthy, now loudly bemoaning Democratic oversight as partisan pettiness, had a far different take in 2015, when he boasted that the Benghazi circus was part of “a strategy to fight and win”: “Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?” he told Sean Hannity of Fox News. “But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping.”

Democrats face the same temptations to overreach, though many of the new committee heads say they learned from the excesses of their Republican predecessors. Thus the decision to hold hearings on presidential tax returns before anyone starts firing off subpoenas to the White House.

Still, it makes sense for Trump to be antsy about the strange, new experience of being held accountable. At least he can take comfort in not having to go through it alone. Just at the Cabinet level, Democrats are also looking at:

• Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who is scheduled to testify next month about whether he lied to Congress regarding his role in adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

• Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, whose personal financial dealings are being scrutinized, as is his department’s decision to ease sanctions on companies tied to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.

• Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, who grudgingly trudged up to Capitol Hill on Friday to discuss the peculiar circumstances of how he came to be in charge of the Justice Department — and, specifically, of the Russia probe, which he has openly criticized.

• The recently departed interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, who remains under investigation by Congress, his former department’s inspector general, and the Justice Department for a range of possible stumbles, including misusing government resources, making policy decisions based on political considerations, and lying to federal investigators.

• Education Secretary Betsy Devos, whom multiple committees are eager to grill about her deregulation of for-profit colleges, rewrite of campus sexual-assault policies and handling of the student-debt crisis.

• Former Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt, whose cavalcade of grifts continues to intrigue both Congress and the agency’s inspector general.

So while the next couple of years may indeed prove vexing for the president, he should focus on the big picture.

Oversight is not the same as harassment. And, so long as Trump has nothing to hide, the public will feel much more confident in his leadership once some of the more disturbing questions have been answered.

“It’s not investigation; it’s oversight.”