Stan Brand on Congressional Subpoenas and Contempt
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 29 January 2019
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
With the Democrats taking control of the House of Representatives, the 116th Congress is expected to be one of vigorous oversight of the executive branch, complete with requests for documents and for testimony from executive branch officials. But how does this actually work, and what happens when the executive branch refuses to comply?
To hash it all out, Brookings Senior Fellow Molly Reynolds spoke with Stan Brand, who served as the general counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives from 1976 to 1983. They talked about the institutional role of the House general counsel, the ins and outs of congressional contempt and subpoena enforcement, and the various challenges that the House will have to confront over the next two years.
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Transcript
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| 0:29.0 | You can imagine that the congress's view of executive privilege is one side of the pancake, |
| 0:41.0 | and the executives is the other side. |
| 0:45.0 | The house for its purposes and to some extent the senate committees have taken the position that executive privilege is fairly limited. |
| 0:51.0 | It's limited to claims of privilege by the president himself with respect to advice that he gets from his closest advisor. |
| 0:58.0 | The department's view is that executive privilege is not limited to that. |
| 1:04.0 | It filters down to lower levels to the departments and agencies. |
| 1:10.0 | In addition to executive privilege, a species of privilege includes what they call the deliberative process privilege, |
| 1:16.0 | which protects their internal deliberations about various and sundry matters. |
| 1:22.0 | Not just in the criminal arena, but in the rulemaking and civil arena as well. |
| 1:28.0 | And so those are the two positions that clash in these cases, as you can imagine, with no clear cut Supreme Court precedent. |
| 1:38.0 | I'm Molly Reynolds, and you're listening to the LawFair podcast, January 29th, 2019. |
| 1:44.0 | With the Democrats taking control of the House of Representatives, |
| 1:48.0 | the 116th Congress is expected to be won a vigorous oversight of the executive branch, |
| 1:54.0 | complete with requests for documents and for testimony from executive branch officials. |
| 1:58.0 | But how does this actually work? |
| 2:00.0 | And what happens when the executive branch refuses to comply? |
... |
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