On May 13 (tomorrow), Judge John D. Bates will hold a consolidated argument in two cases filed to ensure the White House is complying with the Presidential Records Act (PRA). The cases were filed by several interested organizations—including the American Historical Association (AHA), Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and American Oversight—in April shortly after the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) released a shocking opinion concluding that the PRA, a bipartisan statute of almost a half century vintage, is unconstitutional in its “entirety.” After purporting to engage in rigorous constitutional analysis, the 52-page opinion advises the counsel to President Trump that “the President need not further comply with [the PRA’s] dictates.”The opinion and its astonishing conclusion render meaningless nearly 50 years of work by employees, officials, lawyers, and, yes, presidents, in the White House, National Archives, Justice Department, and many other places. As the motion filed by the AHA notes, nine components of the Executive Office of the President (EOP) are covered by the PRA, which employ over 842 individuals. The PRA is a comprehensive statutory scheme enacted after the Watergate scandal to protect the historical record and prevent the manipulation or, as Nixon intended, destruction of government records. The PRA emerged from an extensive, nonpartisan study about what should be done to preserve and protect White House records, a study that incorporated extensive constitutional analysis.No one, to my knowledge, had ever raised any serious constitutional objections to or even concerns about the PRA prior to the release of the OLC opinion. That includes OLC itself, which advised Congress that the PRA was constitutional at the time of its passage and which has on multiple occasions advised the White House, both formally in published opinions and informally and confidentially, on questions related to its application—including during the first Trump administration. Indeed, the Supreme Court considered and rejected many of the arguments raised by OLC and the Justice Department almost 50 years ago in Nixon v. Administrator of General Services. In that case, the Supreme Court rejected Nixon’s constitutional challenge to a presidential records statute that Congress had enacted to preserve Nixon’s records specifically after he had executed an agreement allowing him to destroy records at his discretion.No surprise, then, that former officials such as Gary Stern, the longtime general counsel to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and perhaps the nation’s leading authority on the PRA, found the OLC opinion “astounding.” He was not the only one. Some of my former colleagues have described it to me as, among other things, “outrageous” and “absurd,” and many on social media and elsewhere asked whether the opinion, released on April 1, was an April Fools’ joke.Whatever one thinks about OLC or executive branch lawyering more generally, this opinion stands out for its absurdity. It is, in short, embarrassing