President Richard Nixon And The Watergate Scandal

Growing up, we believe becoming the president is the greatest job in the world because we think the president holds so much power. As we get older, we begin to realize that the president really doesn’t have as much power as we believed they did. The president in my eyes now is just a small puppet that gets its strings pulled by Congress. But not that long ago, presidents did overstep and would take advantage of their power. One president in particular, Richard Nixon, went to court for trying to use his executive privilege, which brings us to the infamous court case US v. Nixon. President Richard Nixon is remembered as the president who misused his presidential power because the Watergate Scandal was one of the worst abuses of executive power in American history. The court case reached high media because there were many accusations of the president having some type of involvement with the break-in in the Democratic National

Nixon case developed because Nixon tried to use his executive power to deny turning over the tapes. The United States has a separation of powers to avoid giving one branch too much power, but Nixon was trying to overstep by not turning in the tapes, and when he finally did release them, they were tampered. Nixon also tried to argue that the tapes could not be heard in courts because it involved arguments between the executive branch. His lawyers also tried to say because he is the president he had immunity to deny releasing any tapes. Executive privilege is basically the president power to withhold information from the public eye. Nixon tried to use that in his favor, but it was rejected because if they allowed that, it would mean he would be immune to judicial review and that is not allowed by the separation of powers. The Supreme Court overruled Nixon’s executive privilege and ruled that he had to release the tapes because national security was compromised and tampered with. Shortly after the tapes were released, Nixon