The House could take subpoena enforcement into its own hands. Will it work?
Fans of political melodrama, at risk of overdose in recent years, have fixated upon a fascinating possibility as House Democrats seek to pry information from President Trump and the White House: What if Congress just arrested administration officials until they testified?
In the abstract, this sounds bizarre to the point of illegality. If you want information from your neighbor, you’re not allowed to simply lock him in your basement until he tells you what you want to know. You can do it, sure, but you’re probably going to go to prison for kidnapping. Why should Congress be different?
The answer is that, unlike you, Congress is allowed to do this.
As we reported in January of last year, the Senate actually detained a former member of the administration of President Herbert Hoover in 1934. Senate investigators were looking for information about certain government contracts, and William MacCracken, who had been assistant secretary of commerce for aeronautics, declined to provide information that had been requested. He was detained first at the home of then-Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Chesley Jurney and, for a second night, at the Willard Hotel in Washington.
Unsurprisingly, MacCracken contested the detention in court. The resulting case, Jurney v. MacCracken, landed at the Supreme Court. The justices determined that the Senate did, in fact, have the power to do precisely what it had done.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-house-could-take-subpoena-enforcement-into-its-own-hands-will-it-work/ar-AABjkoW?li=BBnbcA1
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