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

Floor Speech

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Mr. COLLINS of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to H. Res. 430, a resolution authorizing the Committee on the Judiciary to initiate or intervene in judicial proceedings to enforce certain subpoenas, and for other purposes.

This resolution is an assault on this body's constitutional oversight authorities. By proceeding in this unprecedented manner, the House is putting the judicial branch in an unfortunate position.

Never before has the House authorized the general counsel to sue without first exhausting all our constitutional remedies to gain compliance with our oversight demands. Proceeding in this manner risks weakening our ability to carry out our oversight responsibilities.

On May 8, the Committee on the Judiciary voted 24-16 to hold Attorney General Barr in criminal contempt of Congress. The committee did not pursue contempt against Donald McGahn. Mr. McGahn's case is unique, and I will address it in more detail later.

Contrary to press reports, Mr. Speaker, we are not acting today on the contempt citation reported by the Committee on the Judiciary. We are authorizing the House to sue the Attorney General, Mr. McGahn, and any other official or private citizen any committee chair deems contemptuous in the future.

This is a novel, untested, and risky proposition. I will give it to you this way, Mr. Speaker: The majority is definitely audacious in their request.

The media and the Democrats routinely rail against the President being quick to sue. Well, Mr. Speaker, that is exactly what the majority is doing. Having rushed to contempt, we are now bypassing that remedy altogether and going straight to court.

Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley recently wrote, Democrats' litigation strategy ``is clearly driven more by political than legal calculations.''

This is the problem I have, Mr. Speaker: These tactics weaken the House, aggrandize the executive branch, and cede decisionmaking to the judicial branch.

This is a problem. The majority can mess up oversight however they want to. The majority can rush to judgment whenever they want to.

My chairman has subpoenaed most everything that moves, and it seems other committees are wanting to as well. But here is the problem: When you are rushing to this and you are taking it on grounds that are not legally sound--and which, by the way, at this same hearing where Mr. Turley was, all three of the Democrat witnesses also agreed that the subpoena of the Attorney General was not legal in the sense that it was asking him to do something illegal.

The other issue here is, when you practice proper oversight, we are getting documents on election results, we are also getting documents on immigration and others from this administration. Where the rub has come is in overbroad illegal subpoenas from these committees.

Now, they may want to screw it up now for their purposes, but I don't want it in the future, going forward, where this House's oversight ability has been tampered by a rush to judgment. Let's think about this institution more than our next headline.

This is a problem because it is uncertain here, Mr. Speaker, the House will even be granted standing in court since we have declined to exercise all of our constitutional remedies, namely, contempt, in its many forms.

This is not the only impediment facing Democrats. At every turn, as we have discussed in our minority views to the committee's contempt report, the majority refused to engage with DOJ in the requisite negotiations and accommodation processes.

During our markup of the contempt resolution, the chairman made several damaging admissions--this is the chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary:

First, he conceded the Attorney General cannot lawfully comply with his subpoena demanding grand jury material.

Second, he stated the subpoena was the beginning of a dialogue. I am not sure what first-year law student will believe that a subpoena is the beginning of a dialogue.

Third, he admitted the subpoena was intentionally broad to give the committee clout in court.

Again, I am not sure which Black's Law Dictionary we are looking up under ``subpoena,'' but that is not part of it.

All along, the goal has been to get to court, not to get information and conduct legitimate oversight of Russian interference or secure our elections. If Democrats were interested in these good government issues, they would have accepted DOJ's offer to review the nearly unredacted Mueller report.

Today, Mr. Speaker, the chairman, even, has not done so. The goal is to clearly haul the administration into court in an attempt to pacify a base rabid for impeachment.

When Congress exercises its oversight powers, it must take advantage of every offer of information from the other branch. It is disingenuous to decline the free information Democrats so strongly claim to want. It shows the majority does not want the information; they want a fight.

In addition to the subpoena being overly broad and requiring the Attorney General to violate the law to comply, the chairman failed to establish a valid legislative purpose for his demands. There are other avenues the chairman could seek to get the information he wants. Congress could pass a law granting itself an exemption to grand jury secrecy rules, but the majority has not brought that up.

The most alarming aspect of this action, however, is the unprecedented speed--a mere 44 days passed between the chairman's first request to the Attorney General and the date the committee held him in contempt. In stark contrast, 464 days passed from the date that Chairman Issa requested information from Attorney General Holder on Fast and Furious and the date the Committee on Oversight and Reform held him in contempt, 138 days for Harriet Miers and the date the committee held her in contempt.

The action the majority is authorizing today against Don McGahn, however, Mr. Speaker, is far more egregious for many reasons. Mr. McGahn is not the custodian of the documents the committee and the chairman demand. The White House is. Yet we are smearing a private citizen's reputation and dragging him into court--at taxpayer expense-- in an effort to redo the Mueller investigation because the majority and the media didn't like the outcome.

Democrats again have failed to lay a foundation for any action against Mr. McGahn. Chairman Nadler has never formally objected to the President's protective assertion of executive privilege or other common law privileges asserted by Mr. McGahn.

Under Supreme Court precedent, the chairman must take this important procedural step to pursue further actions against a witness. The witness should be given a clear-cut choice between compliance and noncompliance, between answering the question and risking prosecution for contempt. Here, the witness is being hauled into court without proper notice.

Evidence of this glaring error is in the Record. On May 31, Chairman Nadler wrote Mr. McGahn's counsel and stated he did not agree with the White House or Mr. McGahn and offered to continue negotiating, but the chairman also gave Mr. McGahn a deadline of June 7--this past Friday--to respond. Meanwhile, the Rules Committee noticed a markup of this resolution on June 6, one day before the deadline.

I think we are seeing the pattern here. This is a revealing error. But errors occur when you are pushing action through at light speed and ceding your power to the judicial branch. A court will decide whether the House has standing, whether the case is right, and whether the Congress is entitled to the information outside of an impeachment inquiry.

As also has been said, the propositions are a gamble. Here, Mr. Speaker, we are gambling with the power of a coequal branch. This approach is untested and can do significant harm to Congress' Article I authority.

Lastly, Mr. Speaker, I must make mention, the authorization of the general counsel to seek pro bono legal services circumvents the House ethics rules.

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Mr. COLLINS of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, those rules provide an exception for Members to bring civil action challenging the lawfulness of an action of a Federal agency or an action of a Federal official taken in an official capacity provided that the action concerns a matter of public interest rather than a matter that is personal in nature.

This resolution contravenes ethics rules by giving the general counsel the authority, in Mr. McGahn's case, to solicit a gift: pro bono level services. I am not sure that was the majority's intent, but the inconsistencies result when Democrats aim to rush resolutions through the House outside of regular order.

Mr. Speaker, the majority may wish to change the rules. This majority may wish to get to the finish line quicker. The majority may wish to circumvent everything that is present in this House--and we have seen a lot of it over the past 5\1/2\ months--but I wish they would take into account that they may not be the majority forever, hopefully, and if they mess up oversight of a coequal branch, it is on their hands.

That is what the vote for ``yes'' is on this resolution. That is why a Member of this body should vote ``no'' for the integrity of this House.

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