A republic, if we can keep it: What a White House press pass teaches us about institutions, power and the rule of law
By Anthony Kila
As in our private lives, there are moments in the life of a republic when an apparently small quarrel becomes a major lesson.
A press pass is, after all, only a small piece of plastic. It opens a door, permits a journalist to enter a building, and, on ordinary days, becomes almost invisible within the machinery of government. Yet there are moments when that little pass comes to represent something considerably larger: the relationship between power and scrutiny, between government and governed, and between the office-holder and the institution he temporarily occupies.
United States District Judge Timothy Kelly’s decision to temporarily block the Trump administration from excluding CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House, and to require the restoration of their press credentials, is one such moment. Kelly found that the journalists were likely to succeed in showing that their access had been revoked without constitutionally adequate due process. He also expressed scepticism about the administration’s later claim that national security concerns motivated the ban. The temporary restraining order is limited in duration, but the principle at stake is considerably larger than fourteen days.
It is tempting, particularly in our age of political theatre, to reduce the affair to a quarrel between Donald Trump and the media organisations he regards as hostile to him. That would miss the point.
The more interesting question is not whether CNN is sympathetic to Trump, whether MS NOW is hostile to him, or whether Politico has always reported the White House fairly. The more important question is: What happens to a republic when the government begins to treat independent scrutiny as something granted at the pleasure of the government being scrutinised?
That question takes us much further back than Washington in 2026. It takes us to Athens.
In his celebrated Funeral Oration, Pericles did not merely praise the Athenians for having a government. He praised them for the character of their civic order: a society in which public life belonged to citizens and where the institutions of the city were connected to a conception of civic responsibility and freedom.
The Funeral Oration is, of course, a speech reported by Thucydides and delivered in a very different political world from our own. Ancient Athens was not a modern liberal democracy, and it would be historically careless to pretend otherwise. Yet Pericles understood something that remains useful: a political community is sustained not merely by its rulers but by the habits, expectations and institutions of its citizens.
A democracy therefore cannot be reduced to elections, nor is a republic simply a place where presidents, prime ministers, legislators and judges occupy offices according to constitutional procedure.
A republic is a political arrangement in which power is held in trust, exercised under rules and subject to scrutiny. Please note that the last word matters. Scrutiny is inconvenient by design. The press is not supposed to make government comfortable. Parliament is not supposed to make the executive comfortable. Courts are not supposed to make presidents comfortable. Opposition parties are not supposed to make governing parties comfortable. And citizens are certainly not required to make those who govern them comfortable. This discomfort is part of the machinery.
Another famous Republican warning is attributed to Benjamin Franklin. At the close of the American Constitutional Convention in 1787, Elizabeth Willing Powel is said to have asked Franklin whether the delegates had produced a republic or a monarchy. Franklin’s reported answer was: “A republic, if you can keep it.” Whether Franklin actually said those words or not, the phrase has endured because it captures a truth larger than its provenance. A republic needs to be sustained, and it could give way to something else.
A republic is not sustained by parchment alone; constitutions do not enforce themselves; institutions do not defend themselves; judges do not magically appear when political power overreaches; professional bodies do not spontaneously develop courage; journalists do not automatically become brave; citizens do not remain vigilant forever. A republic survives because, at crucial moments, people and institutions decide that some things cannot be permitted simply because someone powerful wants them to be. That is why the events surrounding the White House press ban deserve attention.
There is an elementary distinction that political systems sometimes forget: the President is an occupant of an office; the republic is the system within which that office exists.
The White House is an extraordinary institution, but it is not the republic. The President is extraordinarily powerful, but he is not the source of all public authority. Government property does not become the office-holder’s private property. Government information does not become presidential information merely because the President controls access to it. Nor can the instruments of the state properly become extensions of personal preference. This is why due process matters.
The White House and the executive branch can regulate access. Security considerations are real. Journalists do not possess an unlimited entitlement to walk into every government building at every hour. But where government has established procedures governing access, the state cannot simply discard those procedures because an official dislikes what a journalist has written. That is the significance of Judge Kelly’s reasoning.
The judge cited established appellate precedents holding that due process applies when the White House seeks to revoke a journalist’s access. He noted that the process required by those precedents had apparently not been followed. The remarkable thing is how unremarkable the principle is. Before punishment, there should be process. That principle is one of civilisation’s great achievements. It protects the unpopular as much as the popular, the irritating as much as the agreeable, and the critic as much as the friend.
There is also a revealing confusion in the argument advanced by the administration’s lawyers: that White House press access is a privilege rather than a right. This distinction is worth clarifying.
A journalist may require credentials to enter a restricted government facility. The government may establish legitimate rules governing access. But the existence of a credentialing system does not mean the press is a guest invited onto government premises solely at the President’s personal pleasure. The journalist’s ultimate client is not the President. It is the public.
The press is one of the principal mechanisms through which citizens learn what those who govern them are doing. Its constitutional protection exists precisely because power has an inherent tendency to prefer praise to scrutiny and comfort to contradiction.
The First Amendment recognises this by protecting freedom of the press. That does not create an absolute constitutional entitlement to a particular room, seat or credential. But it places government restrictions on journalism within a constitutional framework and renders arbitrary retaliation for reporting a profoundly serious matter unlawful.
The distinction should be obvious: the government may regulate access to its premises, but it may not treat the press as a supplicant seeking favour from the government it is supposed to scrutinise. The press is there because the public needs information about government. The President may dislike the reporting; that is not, by itself, a constitutional theory of censorship.
- Anthony Kila is the author of “Crucial Cs Around D: The Disciplines of Decision-Making and Leadership. He is a Jean Monnet Professor of Strategy and Development at the Commonwealth Institute of Advanced and Professional Studies (CIAPS). He also serves as Pro-Chancellor and Chairman of the Governing Council of the Michael and Cecilia Ibru University (MCIU).
