. . . which is what happened with Susan McDougal or
🔹punish the offender and not try to force compliance.
I can think of a few reasons not to try to force compliance. . .
2/
Possible reasons:
🔹The person will just lie and jerk the committee around and waste everyone's time, and getting a conviction for lying is harder than getting a conviction for failing to show up for a deposition.
3/
In this case, the committee plans to have public hearings, and why give such a person a national microphone? If I were the committee I'd want to have cooperating witnesses tell the story.
🔹The person has criminal liability and won't talk anyway, so why waste time?
4/
Because of the Fifth Amendment, prosecutors and investigators are accustomed to putting a case together without the cooperation of the perpetrators.
🔹They don't need the testimony because they have other evidence, so why waste time?
5/
Final reason:
🔹Congress doesn't have a good way to try to force compliance. The Susan McDougal matter came out of a grand jury proceeding. Courts are differently situated from Congress.
The goal is to get all the evidence as expeditiously as possible.
6/
Trying to figure out how to use inherent contempt would be time-consuming and, it seems to me, probably unnecessary.
7/
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We have a decision in Trump's appeal of the trial court's refusal to grant him a preliminary injunction to keep the White House records out of the hands of the select committee.
In a nutshell, Meadows was cooperating with the committee and (he claims) sending the committee everything it asked for (except for a few small things.)
Then, over the weekend, Meadows was “blindsided” to learn that the committee subpoenaed Verizon, the carrier for his personal cell phone, for a list of the names and people he spoke to from October until January 31.
He was livid!
He was enraged!
How DARE they?
2/
He immediately stopped cooperating and filed a lawsuit to prevent the committee from getting his personal call records.
You know what this means, right?
Whatever is in those call records is 🔥
He says he doesn't want anyone to see because it's "intensely personal."
3/
If they say: "The United States was not founded as a democracy," I say, "That's because we had legalized slavery."
Ha! I usually ignore the comment myself because you know exactly who you are dealing with. They're the same people who think the IRS and the SEC are unconstitutional.
But people feel better when they know how to answer.