Trump’s resistance to independent oversight draws bipartisan scrutiny

By Seung Min Kim, Josh Dawsey, Tom Hamburger and Mike DeBonis @ WashingtonPost.com, April 8, 2020 at 9:12 p.m. EDT

[....] Trump’s dismissal of Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community’s inspector general, has in particular troubled influential Senate Republicans who are pushing the president for a more detailed explanation of why Atkinson was suddenly booted from his position late last week [....]

Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), who for decades has championed congressional oversight, is drafting a letter to the president seeking that explanation about Atkinson. Grassley’s effort has been endorsed by Sens. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Democrats in the chamber [....]

Despite some pockets of concern among Republicans, GOP lawmakers have long been deferential to Trump’s presidential prerogative on matters of personnel and policy, reluctant to challenge a party leader with overwhelming support from the GOP base.

“Oversight is important, and we tend to do our part from the congressional side when it comes to implementation of all this,” Senate Majority Whip John Thune (S.D.), the No. 2 Senate Republican, said in an interview Wednesday. “But I guess what I would tell you is what we’ve always said: Whether we agree with some of those decisions or not, the president does get to make those picks and those choices.”

Many Democrats worry that oversight of the coronavirus stimulus will become the latest instance where the legislative and executive branches become bogged down in warfare over their respective powers, with the judiciary failing to resolve those disputes in a timely manner.

“We have discovered with this president how much our democratic system and separation of branches actually operates on respect of norms,” said Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), chairman of the House Oversight subcommittee on government operations. “This president has just blown through all of that and doesn’t care, so we’re going to have to think about statutory restraints on the president.”

In an interview with The Washington Post, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said of Trump: “He dishonors the Constitution. He degrades the environment of what our country is.”

In one sense, Trump’s ouster of Atkinson as the intelligence community’s watchdog was months in the making.

White House officials said Trump was furious with the inspector general for his role in the Ukraine matter and wanted to fire him even late last year — amid the impeachment proceedings in Congress — but was talked out of it.

Johnny McEntee, the president’s new head of presidential personnel, has spoken to Trump in recent weeks about inspectors general as he reviews employees across the government whom he considers disloyal to the president, according to two White House officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose private deliberations [....]