Doctorate in the House

The Last Time Congressional Republicans Remembered Who They Really Served

From Watergate’s bipartisan courage to today’s cowardice on the Epstein files

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Fifty-one years ago today, the Supreme Court delivered one of the most important rulings in American history. In a unanimous decision, the Court ordered President Richard Nixon to turn over subpoenaed White House tape recordings to the Watergate special prosecutor, establishing once and for all that not even the president was above the law.

I was eight years old in the summer of 1974, living in the Netherlands but somehow aware that something monumental was happening across the Atlantic. Even Dutch children who weren’t reading newspapers knew about “Nixon” stepping down. The name stuck in my young mind partly because of its sound. In Dutch, “niks” means nothing, and “niksen” is the verb for doing nothing, often associated with being lazy.

As a child, I enjoyed the art of niksen, but my parents were from the generation that rebuilt our country after the devastation of fascist occupation, and they didn’t want me to develop an affinity for it. So I learned the skill of pretending to be busy while quietly enjoying my ‘niksen’. Although I couldn’t follow the complex political drama…