The president and his pursuers are on a collision course over executive privilege that could end up with the Supreme Court … again. Poppycock. It’s a word you’re probably most accustomed to hearing from dismissive grandmothers or Victorian aristocrats. Like codswallop, balderdash or tommyrot, it has become synonymous with a breed of harmless nonsense. Coming from the mouth of Democratic Sen. Sam J. Ervin Jr., chairman of the Senate Watergate hearings, however, poppycock took on an entirely different connotation in April 1973: one of moral outrage and democratic urgency. “Divine right went out with the American Revolution and doesn’t belong to White House aides,” Ervin told the Senate committee and millions of Americans watching at home in his gentle but forceful North Carolina drawl. “That is not executive privilege. That is executive poppycock.” Ervin was expressing his disdain for the White House’s reluctance to let President Richard Nixon’s aides testify publicly and under oath in the Senate. It was just the first scuffle in a war over executive privilege that would end at the doors of the U.S. Supreme Court and also end Nixon’s presidency. We’ve heard a lot this past week about the current president’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, scheduled to come before Congress in two weeks. Cohen’s testimony could shed some light on whether Donald Trump obstructed justice in the investigation of special counsel Robert Mueller, but the real fight — and the one that the White House is lawyering up to wage — is still to come, and it will focus on the line between privilege and poppycock. Executive privilege can be raised frivolously, but it is a powerful tool. And though it is a legal doctrine — one that may well reach the Supreme Court again — the battle over executive privilege, as Watergate illustrated, really boils down to politics, not the law. | 
