Come on Down and Testify, Donald Trump! – The New Republic

The third and most relevant instance took place 112 years later. One month after he took office in 1974, Gerald Ford shocked the country by granting a full pardon to his predecessor Richard Nixon for any crimes committed during the Watergate crisis. In a televised address, Ford said that Nixon and his family had suffered enough during the national ordeal, and that he wanted to provide a sense of closure to the scandal. My conscience tells me it is my duty, not merely to proclaim domestic tranquility but to use every means that I have to insure it, he said. I do believe that the buck stops here, that I cannot rely upon public opinion polls to tell me what is right.

Fords decision to not rely on polls cost him dearly. In the days before his announcement, a Gallup poll for Newsweek magazine found that 58 percent of Americans opposed any pardon for Nixon. Fords approval rating plunged from a lofty 71 percent shortly after taking office to 49 percent immediately after the decision. Public speculation quickly arose as to whether Ford had struck some kind of corrupt bargain with Nixon, implicitly or explicitly bartering a pardon in exchange for the presidency. Ford unequivocally denied that any such deal had been made in a news conference the following week.

Congress also grew cold towards Ford, who had been House Minority Leader less than a year earlier. Two Democratic representatives, New Yorks Bella Abzug and Michigans John Conyers, filed resolutions in the House demanding more information about the circumstances surrounding Fords decision to pardon Nixon. The House Judiciary Committee also asked the president to send a representative who could explain his actions. Ford responded to the request by saying he would appear himself because he felt, according to the White House, as president the power of pardon is solely his. He ultimately appeared before a House Judiciary subcommittee on October 17.

It was an unusual hearing, to say the least. The committee did not place the president under oath and members treated him with a heightened level of respect and deference compared with normal witnesses. I assure you that there never was at any time any agreement whatsoever concerning a pardon to Mr. Nixon if he were to resign and I were to become president, he assured lawmakers. Ford also reiterated his original reason for issuing the pardon. I wanted to do all I could, he testified, to shift our attention from the pursuit of a fallen president to the pursuit of the urgent needs of a rising nation. Though the public furor largely abated after his testimony, Ford and most others believed the pardon contributed to his defeat in 1976.

House investigators today have little reason to believe that Trump would obey a formal congressional subpoena for his testimony. The White Houses official stance is that the impeachment inquiry is an unconstitutional and illegitimate attempt by Democrats to illicitly overturn the results of the 2016 election. Trumps lawyers have instructed the executive branch not to comply with House subpoenas and document requests with mixed success. And Trump himself would almost certainly challenge such a subpoena all the way to the Supreme Court, which could deliver a ruling that further weakens Congress.

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Come on Down and Testify, Donald Trump! - The New Republic