Opinion

A stupid stonewall

So how dumb is this?

Congress wants to know how unin vited fame-and-glory seekers Tareq and Michaele Salahi managed to crash last month’s state dinner for the prime minister of India — and the White House is stonewalling.

Pretty dumb.

The White House is asserting a claim of separation of powers — executive privilege, if you will — to block social secretary Desiree Rogers from appearing before the House Homeland Security Committee.

To be sure, the basic constitutional principle — that the chief executive’s trusted aides can’t be forced to appear before Congress — is well grounded in law and custom, even if Congress can be counted on to contest specific assertions of the claim.

It’s also common-sensical. A president should be allowed to rely on the counsel of such aides without fear that the advice might someday be picked apart in public by a congressional committee on a fishing expedition.

That said, this principle is usually reserved for conversations between the president and White House counsel, or a national-security adviser, or so on.

But for the person drafting the invite list for fancy dinners? Really?

It appears the White House wants to protect Rogers — and, implicitly, itself — from admitting publicly that she may have seriously erred.

She didn’t assign staffers to vet dinner guests — and attended the dinner herself as a guest, when her presence at the door might have helped keep the Salahis out.

But shielding Rogers — a longtime Obama family friend — from embarrassment at the expense of the White House’s own political capital isn’t very smart.

True, there’s often a steep learning curve for close friends and associates that new presidents bring to Washington. Each administration learns in its own way that people it trusted to “get the job done” back home can flame out in Washington.

But, more to the point, the Salahis’ presence at the dinner represented an appalling breach of security, and of the public trust.

Congress has not only the right, but the duty, to find out how it happened.

If Team Obama wants to draw a line in the sand on separation of powers, it would be wise to do it further up the beach than White House social secretary.

Like we said, dumb.