In the course of writing the piece on enforcement of congressional subpoenas that I mentioned yesterday, I was looking for a copy of the House GOP white paper “A Better Way: Our Vision for a Confident America (The Constitution),” which was issued on June 16, 2016. At this time, of course, the Republican controlled Congress had experienced years of frustration in attempting to get information from the Obama administration (and, one has to imagine, was anticipating more of the same in a Hillary Clinton administration). As it turns out, finding a copy of this document online is more difficult than one would expect. Fortunately, I have located a hard copy in my files and post a link here for anyone who is interested (you’re welcome).
Among the proposals suggested by House Republicans in this paper was “expedited access to federal courts to enforce subpoenas” through legislation “requiring the executive branch to comply with deadlines in congressional subpoenas” and “providing a process for expedited court review when the House or Senate decides to bring litigation to enforce a committee subpoena, including expedited review by a three-judge panel at the district court level with immediate appeal to the Supreme Court.” These ideas would be incorporated into H.R. 4010, introduced by Rep. Darrell Issa, which passed the House in 2017 during the first session of the 115th congress but never received a vote in the Senate.
The white paper made two additional legislative proposals that did not make it into Issa’s legislation (at least in its final form). The first was to “clarify[] the nondiscretionary duty of a U.S. attorney to present a certified order for criminal contempt to a grand jury.” The second was to “statutorily eliminat[e] any privileges asserted by the executive branch when used against a congressional request for information.” Both of these would have been vigorously opposed by OLC and the executive branch on constitutional as well as policy grounds.