If reporters can only maintain their access to the White House by staying in Donald Trump’s good graces, they will not be free to do their most vital work, and the public will be deprived of information that is essential to its democratic role as a check on corruption and despotism.

That’s why I’m suing him.

If Trump has his way, the press pool will eventually consist solely of enablers and courtiers, of whom there are already too many. They will not raise the pressing issues that the American people need Trump to address. We will not see how he reacts to tough questions — whether he answers them at all, gets angry, lies, attacks, changes the subject or gets flustered.

And the threat of being targeted in the future is already distorting the reporting of news organizations. According to an ABC News lawyer, the network’s news division has been tempering its election coverage ahead of the midterms, for fear of retribution.

Trump most recently punished MS NOW, CNN and Politico by banning them from the White House. They sued, and a federal judge tentatively restored their access. But Trump is appealing. He is making a preposterous argument citing national security. The White House has continued to exclude CNN and Politico from pool duty on Air Force One. The Independent’s correspondent, Andrew Feinberg, was kicked off Air Force One on Thursday after he somehow infuriated the president the day before. And as Trump said last month, “There may be others to follow.”

These actions amount to an unconstitutional attack on the public’s right to trustworthy and undistorted reporting about the president and his policies.

For this reason, I am one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed on Monday by the champions of the free press at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School. My fellow plaintiffs include Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch; Yale history professor Beverly Gage; and Benjamin Wittes, the editor-in-chief of Lawfare.

We all rely on newsgathering and reporting from members of the White House press corps. Our right to that information would be abridged if the only reporters left there were either toadies or too scared of losing access to ask tough questions and speak the truth.

Indeed, because of the chilling effect created by Trump’s threats, my rights (and yours) to trusted information from independent news organizations are already being violated.

And that is no small thing. The founders put freedom of the press in the First Amendment to guarantee an independent and uncensored press that could fully inform the public and hold the government accountable.

“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1787. “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

When the Supreme Court rejected the Nixon administration’s efforts to block newspapers from publishing the Pentagon Papers, Justice Hugo Black wrote, “In the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors … Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.”

For over a century, every president has recognized the obligation to provide spaces nearby where the press can engage in First Amendment-protected newsgathering.

Both the practical and the constitutional necessities were obvious. Particularly in times of crisis, the pool’s presence as independent witnesses in the White House and on Air Force One — attesting to the president’s health and safety, for instance — is essential so the American people don’t just have to take the government’s word for it.

The lawsuit from the currently targeted news organizations is a good first step toward restoring the status quo. But the only way to truly protect our right to independent reporting is for the courts to deliver a ruling that prevents Trump or any other president from ever doing this again, to anyone.

As a press critic who believes that the most essential job of a political reporter is to hold the powerful accountable, I have criticized the White House press corps over the years — but only in practice, not in principle. Its members are the only outsiders whom Trump is required to admit into his bubble of sycophancy. They alone can ask him difficult questions, get him to respond to facts he would rather not acknowledge, and confront him with his lies. They alone can demand answers. And they do that on behalf of the American people, who have no such opportunity.

Trump’s new de facto policy — which he himself described as a “ban on the free press” — cannot be allowed to stand.