Right Voices

WSJThe Senate response to the White House’s unprecedented decision to release 75,000 pages of documents relating to John Roberts’s tenure in the Reagan Administration gives new meaning to the adage that no good deed goes unpunished.

At about the time the first batch of documents was being delivered to Capitol Hill Tuesday afternoon, the eight Democrats on the Judiciary Committee sent a thank you letter to President Bush that began with the words, “We are disappointed,” and went on to label as “ill-advised” the Administration’s decision not to release Judge Robert’s papers from his years as Deputy Solicitor General under the first President Bush.

Just to be helpful, they also attached a list of 35 subject areas in which they are interested–including “Abortion” and “Death Squads Investigation.” Ted Kennedy issued a separate statement demanding the release of the Solicitor General papers and asserting: “There is no privilege, there is no rule, and there is no logic that would bar us from getting these documents.”

The Senator from Massachusetts is wrong about privilege, but he has a point about White House logic. By authorizing the release of documents from Judge Roberts’s work in the Reagan Justice Department and White House Counsel’s office, the Bush Administration had made it that much harder to refuse Democratic demands for his later work product from the Solicitor General’s office. More important, it makes it harder for the White House to defend the vital constitutional principle of executive privilege.