Battered Congress Syndrome

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, June 24, 2008

President Bush doesn't hesitate to kick Congress around, but Congress just can't bring itself to kick back.

During oral arguments yesterday about whether a federal judge should enforce congressional subpoenas against a belligerent White House, representatives of the judicial and executive branches both noted that Congress hasn't exercised its full constitutional powers.

As Del Quentin Weber writes in The Washington Post, District Court Judge John D. Bates suggested that "the House could take other actions to compel the testimony. For example, the judge said, the House could order [White House Counsel Harriet] Miers's arrest and detention in a cell in the Capitol until she agreed to testify. Such actions were fairly common in the 19th century."

And Susan Crabtree writes for the Hill that Carl Nichols, the principal deputy associate attorney general, "argued that Congress could have decided to withhold Justice Department appropriations or refused to pass judicial nominations."

But the Democratic-controlled Congress, of course, hasn't done either of those things. Members instead chose to solicit help from the judicial branch -- the constitutional equivalent of running to Mommy. And not surprisingly, this didn't make Mommy very happy.

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