The press is not the enemy of order — it is one of its guardians

The NPR report tells us that The New York Times will argue in court that the White House has been abusing the legal system to intimidate its reporters over a story that angered President Trump. I am told no more of the particulars than what that lead provides. But I need no further particulars to speak to the shape of the civic question, because that shape is as old as the Republic itself.

A free press is not a courtesy extended by those in power. It is a structural check on power — as essential, in its way, as any clause of the Constitution. I presided over a government that was itself criticized sharply, often unfairly, in the newspapers of my day. I did not always receive it with equanimity. But I understood, even when my temper protested, that a government which could silence its critics had acquired a tool no free people should ever place in an executive's hands.

The particular danger here is not even censorship in the blunt old sense — the padlocked press, the confiscated pamphlet. It is something more patient and more corrosive: the use of legal process itself as the instrument of intimidation. When investigations, subpoenas, or litigation are deployed not to seek justice but to make the cost of reporting prohibitively high, the law has been turned against the very order it exists to protect. The office of the executive is made smaller, not larger, by such conduct.

I would counsel those who find the Times politically distasteful to resist the temptation to cheer this particular contest simply because the target is unfriendly to them. The precedent being set does not ask your party affiliation before it applies. A mechanism of intimidation, once normalized, will be inherited by whoever holds the office next — and the one after that. Those who build such instruments rarely remain in the position to control them forever.

I cannot speak to the merits of the underlying story, nor to every legal argument that will be advanced on Thursday. That is properly a matter for the courts. What I can say with confidence is this: the Republic's institutions — its judiciary, its press, its tradition of limited executive power — are habits more than they are walls. They hold because citizens and officeholders alike choose to honor them. When an administration is credibly accused of treating legal process as a lever of political punishment, it falls to every citizen, regardless of faction, to look squarely at that accusation and demand a full accounting. The health of the compact requires nothing less.