At odds in the two cases before the Supreme Court were disputes over President Trump’s financial records—sought by both Congress and prosecutors in New York City.
Photo: alexander drago/ReutersWASHINGTON—The Supreme Court on Thursday handed down two major rulings on the powers, privileges and immunities of the presidency that will have lasting impact on how future disputes between the White House, Congress and prosecutors are handled.
In both decisions, the courts rejected arguments from President Trump’s lawyers and the Justice Department that a president has immunities and privileges that put him completely beyond the reach of authorities seeking his documents or testimony.
In addition, the Supreme Court inserted the federal courts more fully in mediating disputes between Congress and the White House—putting some limits on what Congress can obtain from a president while also rejecting claims that a president can assert a sweeping privilege against turning over his records to Capitol Hill.
In its decisions, the court “affirmed the fundamental principle that the president is not above the law—even the president’s private business dealings are subject to the same standards of legal inquiry and investigation as any other U.S. citizen,” said Mark Rozell, a professor at George Mason University who has studied executive power and the presidency.
At odds in the two cases were disputes over Mr. Trump’s financial records—sought by both Congress and prosecutors in New York City. The court rejected the notion advanced by Mr. Trump’s lawyers that he had “absolute immunity” from having to turn over records to prosecutors in New York—with two of Mr. Trump’s own appointees to the court, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, ruling against him.
In the congressional case, the court was more circumspect and it left key issues unresolved.
While recognizing that congressional power to investigate was limited, the majority noted that they had never before been asked to decide a case involving a congressional subpoena for the president’s private papers. In a 7-2 decision, the Supreme Court sent the congressional subpoena case back down to a lower court with detailed instructions on the duty to balance the needs of Congress with those of the executive.
The cases are likely to have an especially significant impact beyond Mr. Trump’s tenure in office in the context of congressional investigations where Mr. Trump and the Democratic-led House have been tangling over numerous issues both before and in the aftermath of his impeachment trial.
The decision in the congressional subpoena case reaffirmed limits to Congress’s ordinary investigative power—with the court saying that it needed a legislative purpose to obtain information in many circumstances.
“I think that’s the most important finding regarding the future of the presidency and separation of powers,” said Mr. Rozell, the George Mason professor. “The court has established a line here that Congress doesn’t have the power of what might be called the fishing expedition—to search for any and everything.”
A lawyer for Mr. Trump portrayed the two decisions as a victory—noting the cases would now return to the lower courts for additional proceedings. “We will now proceed to raise additional Constitutional and legal issues in the lower courts,” wrote attorney Jay Sekulow on Twitter.
Lawyers representing the president either in his personal or institutional capacity have argued at various points that law enforcement can’t investigate the president at all; that he can shut down investigations into himself or his associates; and that obstruction-of-justice laws don’t apply to the president, The Wall Street Journal has previously reported. In one notable incident, a lawyer representing Mr. Trump argued that he couldn’t be investigated by state prosecutors while in office—even if he were to commit murder.
The two cases decided by the Supreme Court this week are the first test of those legal theories at the high court—and suggest that the justices are unlikely to bless such sweeping presidential authority and power.
“We really see these cases as one facet of an ongoing and aggressive project of the Trump administration to completely reshape the presidency into one that is unchecked, not accountable to anyone and really where there is total power within the person of the president,” said Jamila Benkato, the counsel at Protect Democracy, a bipartisan legal advocacy group that has been critical of Mr. Trump.
The court also recognized that it was wading into uncharted territory—taking on a new role of mediating disputes that had historically been solved in negotiation and compromise rather than litigation.
In the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts traced the history of disputes between Congress and the executive branch back to the very beginning of the nation.
In 1792, a House committee demanded documents from President George Washington pertaining to General Arthur St. Clair’s campaign against the Indians in the Northwest Territory, “which had concluded in an utter rout of federal forces when they were caught by surprise near the present-day border between Ohio and Indiana,” he wrote.
“President Washington called a cabinet meeting, wishing to take care that his response ‘be rightly conducted’ because it could ‘become a precedent,’” the opinion recalled. Ultimately, the cabinet sought a balance by recognizing Congress has the right to ask while the executive branch could exercise its own discretion.
“The discussions were apparently fruitful, as the House later narrowed its request and the documents were supplied without recourse to the courts,” the justices noted.
The majority opinion also touched on more recent clashes involving Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.
“For more than two centuries, the political branches have resolved information disputes using the wide variety of means that the Constitution puts at their disposal. The nature of such interactions would be transformed by judicial enforcement of either of the approaches suggested by the parties,” the majority on the court wrote, rejecting the arguments of both the Trump administration and Congress and establishing its own balancing test that courts should consider when hearing this and future cases.
“Courts must perform a careful analysis that takes adequate account of the separation of powers principles at stake, including both the significant legislative interests of Congress and the ‘unique position’ of the President,” the court ruled.
Write to Byron Tau at byron.tau@wsj.com
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