On: Trump bans CNN, MS Now and Politico from the White House

Three names struck from the roll of those permitted to witness power. Three newsrooms - CNN, MS Now, Politico - declared unwelcome at the very building whose occupant they are charged with examining. The charge is hostility; the sentence, banishment from the scene.

Let me build the case as a prosecutor would. Fact: the president has excluded reporters whose questions displease him. Fact: this follows a term of similar expulsions, each one called an exception, each one a precedent. Fact: what remains is a press corps selected for obedience. Implication: the record of power will now be written by those power approves. Implication: the citizen learns of his government only what his government permits. And the verdict follows not from passion but from arithmetic: a ruler who chooses his own examiners has abolished examination.

How long? How long shall we call each expulsion a matter of etiquette, each exclusion a private courtesy, when the sum of them is a wall around the strongest office in the world?

The defense will speak, and I will let it. They will say these outlets are partisan, that their coverage is hostile, that no ruler is obliged to summon his accusers before his tribunal. I answer: the Republic does not ask whether the questioner is friendly. It asks whether the question was answered in public, on the record, before witnesses. Access is not a favor bestowed by the powerful upon the obedient; it is the instrument by which the powerful are made answerable. To grant it by loyalty test is to convert the press office into a court that hears only flattery.

I have known exile. It does not silence the banished; it silences the room they leave empty.

The Republic survives its enemies. It does not survive its silence.