There have always been document disputes between presidents and Congress. But this is the first such blanket refusal at least since Watergate, when Congress made the refusal itself an article of impeachment. If Trump succeeds — Republican lawmakers have, so far, defended the refusal, while courts have moved slowly — it will mean no future president would feel compelled to turn over a single document to Congress. Future Republicans would be unable to investigate the next Whitewater, Fast and Furious, Solyndra, IRS targeting or Benghazi. During the Fast and Furious gun-trafficking scandal, the Obama administration turned over (both voluntarily and by court compulsion) more than 65,000 pages of documents. It provided more than 300,000 pages of documents for the Solyndra bankruptcy inquiry.

The Republicans’ Benghazi report boasted that it had access to 107 witnesses, including 57 from the State Department, 24 from the Pentagon, 19 from the CIA, the national security adviser and her deputy, and Clinton herself. They received 75,000 documents (on top of 50,000 from previous batches): 71,640 from State, 300 from the CIA (including messages not “generally made available to Congress”), 1,450 from the White House, 179 from Sidney Blumenthal, 900 from the Pentagon and 750 from the National Security Agency.