House votes to ask courts to enforce subpoenas
WASHINGTON — The House took its strongest step yet in the standoff with President Donald Trump over congressional oversight, voting Tuesday to seek court enforcement of subpoenas for Attorney General William Barr and former White House counsel Donald Mcgahn.
On a party-line vote of 229-191, the House passed a resolution that would empower the House Judiciary Committee to go to court against Barr and Mcgahn over noncompliance with requests for documents and testimony.
The vote keeps Democrats squarely on a meticulous investigative track favored by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-calif., and other top leaders — and away from the formal impeachment inquiry that some 60 rank-and-file Democrats and several 2020 presidential candidates have been seeking.
Still, the House vote reflects the frustration among Democrats with Trump’s unwillingness to cooperate with congressional investigators who argue they have a constitutional right to examine the executive branch.
“We are here today because the times have found us,” said Pelosi, quoting one of the Founding Fathers, Thomas Paine, in remarks on the House floor. “While we do not place ourselves in the same category of greatness as our founders, we do recognize the urgency of the threat to our nation we face today.”
In fact, shortly before the House vote, a new clash erupted between the administration and Congress. Barr said he will ask Trump to assert executive privilege to shield documents on the administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census if the House Oversight Committee moves ahead Wednesday on holding Barr in contempt.
The Justice Department letter revealing the threat came on the eve of an expected Oversight Committee vote to hold Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt for not turning over documents lawmakers had subpoenaed and stopping a witness from testifying without a Justice Department lawyer.
The vote and moves by the congressional committees have hardened the divide between the two parties.
House Republicans lambasted the House vote as a distraction from bigger issues facing the country, including the crisis on the southern border. Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-LA., borrowed one of Trump’s favorite descriptions, calling the vote “presidential harassment.”
“When you go around the country, you don’t hear people saying they want to continue going down this rathole of witch hunts and impeachments,” he told reporters.
The vote stops short of a criminal contempt citation — a more serious sanction — and it comes a day after the Justice Department agreed to begin providing materials gathered by former special counsel Robert Mueller during his nearly two-year probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Still, Democrats cast the vote as their most serious move yet in a campaign to hold Trump accountable for his actions to derail Mueller’s investigation.
Pelosi said “not even close” to a majority of House Democrats favor launching impeachment proceedings against Trump, and she would not say whether she would allow an inquiry to proceed if most Democrats favored one.
Heading to Iowa, Trump criticized the Democrats’ investigations.
“All they do is waste time where there is no obstruction, no collusion. And in the meantime, we can’t get anything done,” the president said. “We need them to work on illegal immigration, on drug prices, on infrastructure.”
The Judiciary panel could move swiftly to ask a judge to order testimony from Mcgahn, who was a key witness in Mueller’s investigation into whether Trump obstructed justice during the probe. The committee could also petition a federal judge to release protected grand jury materials gathered in the probe, which underpin many of the key sections that Justice Department officials redacted from Mueller’s report.
Mcgahn has so far declined to testify pursuant to a White House legal opinion holding that close presidential advisers cannot be compelled to testify.