Comments by "" (@JohnDoe-ew3xt) on "CBS Miami"
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@raykahn455 "oh kind of like all the congressmen who refused to answer suponeas from 1/6"
no, that's a little different ray...
congress has the oversight authority to subpoena government information.
a political committee does not have the legal authority to compel anyone to testify against their will.
Congress has no explicit constitutional power to conduct investigations or issue subpoenas. However, such powers are well-established, dating back to colonial-era state legislatures and the British parliament. In 1927, the Supreme Court held in McGrain v. Daugherty that “the power of inquiry—with process to enforce it—is an essential and appropriate auxiliary to the legislative function.” The court reaffirmed this view as recently as 2020, in Trump v. Mazars USA, LLP, a case in which the court held that separation of powers concerns are relevant in a dispute over congressional subpoenas seeking the president’s personal information.
The Mazars court also spelled out several limitations on the “broad” power of inquiry recognized in prior cases, grounded in the fact that Congress’s investigatory power is ancillary to its legislative role. First, a congressional subpoena must be “related to, and in furtherance of, a legitimate task of the Congress,” meaning it must serve a “valid legislative purpose” and must “concern[] a subject on which legislation ‘could be had.’” Second, the subpoena may not be issued for the purpose of “law enforcement.” Third, recipients of congressional subpoenas retain constitutional rights as well as common law and constitutional privileges.
This D.C. Circuit language goes a long way to answering the question of the authority to issue a subpoena to a sitting member of Congress.
Yet potential challenges to the committee’s issuance of a subpoena are still possible. They encompass issues both germane to members’ status as representatives and more general objections available to any witness.
One objection House members may raise to a subpoena is that the Jan. 6 committee is not properly constituted and therefore lacks the authority to subpoena any witnesses, an issue not raised in Thompson. Section 2(a) of the House authorizing resolution calls for the appointment of 13 committee members, five of whom are to be appointed following “consultation with the [House] minority leader,” though it does not require acquiescence to the minority leader’s recommendations. After Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi rejected two of Minority Leader McCarthy’s recommendations, McCarthy pulled all of his nominees to the committee and the speaker declined to appoint additional Democratic members in their stead. As a result, only nine members currently sit on the Jan. 6 committee, arguably in defiance of its composition requirements. However, such arguments are unlikely to succeed. Additionally, the House has broad deference to interpret its own rules. For example, previous House select committees were originally designated to encompass members of the minority party but operated without their nomination, and similar objections have been raised by other witnesses and rejected, as it would be “improper for [a] court to say … the Speaker … does not understand House rules and the House resolution[.]”
House members may also argue that the general subpoena authority vested in the Jan. 6 committee should not be presumptively read to include the power to subpoena a member of Congress absent express authority to do so. However, such an argument would likely not stand up in court since under the Rulemaking Clause of the Constitution, Article I, Section 5, “[e]ach House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings[.]” Insofar as there is any ambiguity in the committee’s rules, a court would likely defer to the House’s interpretation, because as the D.C. Circuit has observed, “judicial interpretation of an ambiguous House Rule runs the risk of the court intruding into the sphere of influence reserved to the legislative branch,” causing any attempt at interpretation to “effectively be making the Rules—a power … reserve[d] to each House alone.” Additionally, the House has previously read a general subpoena authority vested in the congressional ethics committee to encompass the power to subpoena a member of the chamber.
The final possible challenge to a subpoena’s issuance may be one of novelty: Because a select committee has never previously subpoenaed a sitting member of Congress, the power is beyond the scope of the Jan. 6 committee.
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