Obama's NSA Defense: Says Congress Can Raise Objections, BUT it Can't as a Whole!

[struggle4progress]

35. The court squarely addressed the issue you raised upthread, namely, the question

of which clause or clauses the word "treason" affects:

... Senator Gravel disavows any assertion of general immunity from the criminal law. But he points out that the last portion of 6 affords Members of Congress another vital privilege - they may not be questioned in any other place for any speech or debate in either House. The claim is not that while one part of 6 generally permits prosecutions for treason, felony, and breach of the peace, another part nevertheless broadly forbids them. Rather, his insistence is that the Speech or Debate Clause at the very least protects him from criminal or civil liability and from questioning elsewhere than in the Senate, with respect to the events occurring at the subcommittee hearing at which the Pentagon Papers were introduced into the public record. To us this claim is incontrovertible ...

That is, there is no exception in the speech and debate clause