Authorizing the Committee on the Judiciary to Initiate or Intervene in Judicial Proceedings to Enforce Certain Subpoenas

Floor Speech

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Mr. NADLER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, when a congressional committee issues a subpoena, compliance is not optional. We expect witnesses to testify when summoned. We expect the administration to comply with subpoenas and to provide us with the materials we require to do our jobs.

Of course, there may be differences between the Congress and the executive branch as to what information can be produced on a timely basis. When those differences arise, we are required to seek a reasonable accommodation.

We first requested access to the full Mueller report and the underlying evidence on February 22. After refusing for almost 4 months, the Department of Justice, in the last few days, has finally agreed to permit us to view the special counsel's most important files.

We are hopeful this will provide us with key evidence regarding allegations of obstruction of justice and other misconduct.

Given this potential breakthrough, we will hold the criminal contempt process for Attorney General Barr in abeyance for now.

But President Trump has blocked other key witnesses from testifying before the Judiciary Committee, including his former White House counsel Don McGahn, whose account of the President's actions was featured in the Mueller report.

The President has claimed absolute immunity for critical witnesses to prevent them from even showing up. He has invoked executive privilege to prevent us from seeing documents that stopped being privileged long ago, if they were ever privileged to begin with.

He has done the same in response to Congress' important work unrelated to the Mueller report, and he has ordered the agencies not to cooperate with even our most basic oversight requests.

This unprecedented stonewalling by the administration is completely unacceptable. The committees have a constitutional responsibility to conduct oversight, to make recommendations to the House as necessary, and to craft legislation that will curb the abuse of power on full display in the Trump administration.

This is why it is important that the Judiciary Committee be able to act in such matters using all of our Article I powers, as contemplated in this resolution and described in both the Rules Committee report and the House Judiciary Committee's contempt report.

Now, I heard what the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Woodall) said a few minutes ago, and he is exactly right. This resolution gives committee chairs the power, with the approval of the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group, to go to court on behalf of the House to enforce our subpoenas.

This has not been done before, but neither have we ever seen blanket stonewalling by the administration of all information requests by the House. We have never faced such blanket stonewalling.

The President himself said--and they have been as good as their word--they will oppose all of our subpoenas.

We must go to court to enforce the subpoenas without a separate floor vote each time if we are going to enforce our subpoenas and reject the arrogant assumption of power by the administration and denigration of the power of the House and of the Congress.

We cannot afford to waste all the floor time every single time the administration rejects one of our subpoenas, which is every time we issue a subpoena.

That is why we must pass this resolution.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support this resolution so that we can get into court and break the stonewall without delay.

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