PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus use an image from my favorite sport, golf. Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as a Congressional press secretary in Washington, D.C., an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and a private sector lobbyist. This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.

At first blush, it may sound a bit juvenile.

Leaders of the Executive Branch in Washington, D.C. won’t subject themselves to questions, in public, from legislative staff.

The Members of Congress, if they were summoned to the White House or to a federal agency’s headquarters, would expect to speak to the top person – either the president or the agency director – not lower-level staff.

All of this came to mind late this week as I was reading a piece in the Wall Street Journal by columnist James Freeman. It appeared under this headline:

Nancy Pelosi Backs William Barr

The Speaker agrees that senior government officials don’t answer to staff

Freeman added: “It’s not easy keeping up with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s shifting position on the conduct of President Donald Trump. But at least for the moment the California Democrat seems to be in agreement with Attorney General William Barr on a key question regarding our co-equal branches of government.

“President Trump abruptly blew up a meeting with Democratic congressional leaders on Wednesday, declaring that he could not work with them until they stopped investigating him and lashing out at Speaker Nancy Pelosi for accusing him of a cover-up.

“After Trump walked out, Pelosi turned to other Democrats there and recounted a story about how Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt had each brought people together to solve infrastructure problems.

“Kellyanne Conway, the counselor to the president, was in the room. ‘Respectfully, Madam Speaker,’ she asked, ‘do you have a direct response to the president?

“Pelosi said she was responding to the president, not members of his staff.”

There!  The co-equal branches point.

Pelosi’s position is in direct conflict with the House Judiciary Committee where the incendiary chair, Representative Jerrold Nadler, D-New York, wants Attorney General William Barr to submit to questions from Judiciary staff, not just elected members of the committee.

Barr, properly, said no.

In a statement, a Justice Department spokesperson described the conditions set by the committee’s chair as “unprecedented and unnecessary.”

“Congress and the executive branch are co-equal branches of government, and each have a constitutional obligation to respect and accommodate one another’s legitimate interests. Chair Nadler’s insistence on having staff question the attorney general, a Senate-confirmed cabinet member, is inappropriate.

Wall Street Journal reader Greg Woods put it this way in a letter to the editor:

“Imagine for a moment that the House invites the leadership of the Senate over to discuss pending legislation. When the senators arrive, they find only staff waiting for them. They would no doubt walk out the door in a huff. The way Congress acknowledges that the Executive Branch is a co-equal branch is by following this simple rule: Staff meets with staff, and principals meet with principals.

“Nadler’s violation of this rule isn’t just an insult to Barr, it is a constitutional insult to the Office of the Attorney General, implying that Congress has supremacy over the executive branch. If Barr does meet with the Judiciary Committee, and Nadler allows a staff member to ask questions, Barr should direct a member of his staff to replace him at the table and direct that staff member to answer each question with: ‘I am not authorized by the attorney general to answer that question.’”

This resonates with me as a former member of the state government Executive Branch in Oregon. I thought then and think now that the branches ought to be – and appear to be – co-equal. The Executive Branch runs government programs and relates to the Legislative Branch.

Mutual respect. Each deserves it from the other.

Many years ago, sitting at the witness table as the deputy director of the Oregon Economic Development Department before a legislative committee, I often had to endure hard questions from legislators. No problem, as long as the goal was policy, not personality.

For me, it never got as bad as it did for one agency head, a friend. He was at the witness table where he was subjected to over-the-top negative questions, including about his personality.

At one point, he had enough. He stood at the table and said, “I don’t have to take this s_____ from anyone,” and stalked out of the room.

I was one of the agency directors in the back of the hearing room and, with others, I nearly rose to give the one who walked a standing ovation. Plus, he was credible enough that he survived the episode.

The point: Developing sound policy on pressing problems requires mutual requires branch to branch. It also requires top leader-to-top-leader contact buttressed by staff-to-staff contact.

It would be good if all of us would remember this key approach to operating in an ever-changing political world that sometimes is not marked by mutual respect, but by the politics of personal destruction.