executive branch and lasting damage to the separation of powers. here s the question. who gets to say, right? i mean, right now, congress is in court with the the executive branch. right? they re trying to get certain things enforced. but the way political time cycles work versus judicial time cycles, it s very easy for courts to just kind of kick the can down the road and essentially the white house wins? right. so delay favors the status quo and in that case, this means the executive branch. so congress has gone to court over the tax returns but congress has not gone to court in the impeachment inquiry. in fact, they ve pulled back from that possibility. that s right. exactly. they withdrew a subpoena from this one witness, charles kupperman who he went to court himself. he said wait a second, i don t know what to do. president s telling me not to talk. congress wants me to talk. congress said, you know, this is going to take forever. effectively, this is a kind of political
here is the power of the willing witnesses. all these people who have testified, right, most of them are career professionals in the government. they are seeing things that truly alarm them and they are choosing to defy the president s directive and obey the directive from congress to show up and talk and that s because they think what they have to say is really important for the country to hear. in the case of that, the case you just mentioned where the subpoena was withdrawn, do you think that i mean, there s the delay aspect of it. but i wondered also if the house was worried about an adverse ruling, right? because there s this weird gambit kupperman is his name, right? so kupperman is a deputy of bolton. and he s first person who actually says i don t know what to do. i ll affirmatively go to the court and ask the court to tell me. everyone else just makes up their mind. and bolton has said on the record he would follow kupperman s lead. whatever the court told him to do, he wo
are we going to end up with some of this in front of the supreme court? it seems like we don t get out of this year without a court decision on some of the scope of these issues. yeah. so this case we re talking about involving the manhattan d.a. s office, you re right. the trump administration has said we are going to ask the supreme court to take this case. the supreme court could say no. it s a really pretty good appellate court decision. pretty basic. and that could keep it out of the courts at least for now. but there are other cases bubbling up too. another case about congress trying to get the tax returns from trump. that s in the d.c. courts in washington. and that case also looks bound for the supreme court. so it does seem likely that we re going to hear from the court in at least one of these matters. the big fear here, right now the setup that everyone s sort of been using is you have egot three branches of government and article one congress, article two the white hous
witnesses? i think that s possible. i think they also look at this very conservative supreme court. some of its members have shown they think executive power is a really important value. and if right so if you re a congressman, you think this is going to take so long anyway. by the time i get any information, it s got to have lost its political value. and there s some chance a supreme court is going to rule against congress. setting a precedent that would be bad. like, what s the point of this? and that s another reason to withdrawal the subpoena. so we ve got the district attorney going in the supreme court. yes. we don t know if they ll grant cert on it. but they re going to petition, right? so there s three levels to the federal judiciary. district court, that s the trial court. appellate car appellate court. circuit courts. supreme court. there s just three. one thing this administration has done is to skip a step because they want to get to supreme court because they r