Constitutional Powers and Crimes

For obvious reasons, people have been talking recently about whether it can ever be a crime for the President to instruct a subordinate to end a criminal investigation.  The possible crime here is obstruction of justice.  And the major argument why it cannot be a crime is that the power to enforce laws is assigned to the Executive by the Constitution.  Because deciding whether to investigate and prosecute individuals is solely within the purview of the Executive, and because there are no limits on the reasons why a President can decline to prosecute, some argue that it can never be a crime for a President to end an investigation. 

Without offering any thoughts on whether certain actions actually rise to the level of obstruction of justice, I want to offer a brief explanation why I don’t think this constitutional powers argument is particularly persuasive. 

It is well established that government actors can be convicted for inappropriately exercising their governmental powers.  Any government official who performs an official act in exchange for money, for example, has committed bribery, even if it would have been perfectly legal for her to have taken the same official act under other circumstances.

Unlike bribery, an obstruction of justice charge doesn’t require a separate criminal act; there is no quid pro quo.  And so some might think that, because Presidents are allowed to make non-prosecution decisions for any reason, the simple decision not to prosecution can’t be criminal, no matter what the reason.  But this argument goes too far. 

In a number of situations, the courts have recognized that otherwise unlimited discretion can’t be exercised for certain, forbidden reasons.  That is why, for example, the courts are willing to reverse sentences in discretionary sentencing systems if the sentence is based on race or national origin.  The Supreme Court has also repeatedly said that executive decisions whether to prosecute cannot be made for discriminatory reasons, even if charges are otherwise supported by probable cause.

Now, one might respond that obstruction of justice is different than these other examples because it is a legislative limit on executive power, rather than a constitutional limit.  But I’m not sure that’s a particularly good response.  For one thing, no one disputes that Congress has the most obvious constraint on executive power to prosecute: the power to define crimes.  For another, obstruction of justice is one of many laws that place limits on what the President may or may not do.  Bribery is also a legislative limitation, rather than a constitutional limitation.  Maybe there is some clever constitutional argument to be made about limits on Congress’s ability to restrict the executive’s prosecutorial power.  But obstruction of justice isn’t that sort of limit; it is a generally applicable law that forbids all individuals from taking certain actions for certain reasons.

In short, the simple fact that the Constitution assigns a particular power to an individual does not mean that power is unlimited.  To be clear, I am not saying that a sitting President can be prosecuted (though I may offer thoughts on another day on the weaknesses of that OLC memo on the topic).  Nor am I making a statutory claim about whether this President has obstructed justice.  I am simply saying that otherwise unfettered discretion may not be exercised for particular reasons, which leads me to conclude that a sitting President, like any other individual, can obstruct justice.