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CTAtheist

(88 posts)
10. I am not sure, there's conflicting info on the subject.
Tue Apr 23, 2019, 10:36 PM
Apr 2019

"From the Republic’s earliest days, Congress has had the right to hold recalcitrant witnesses in contempt — and even imprison them — all by itself. In 1795, shortly after the Constitution was ratified, the House ordered its sergeant at arms to arrest and detain two men accused of trying to bribe members of Congress. The House held a trial and convicted one of them.

In 1821, the Supreme Court upheld Congress’s right to hold people in contempt and imprison them. Without this power, the court ruled, Congress would “be exposed to every indignity and interruption, that rudeness, caprice, or even conspiracy, may mediate against it.” Later, in a 1927 case arising from the Teapot Dome scandal, the court upheld the Senate’s arrest of the brother of a former attorney general — carried out in Ohio by the deputy sergeant at arms — for ignoring a subpoena to testify.

The Congressional Research Service issued a report in July that confirmed Congress’s inherent contempt powers. It explained how they work: “The individual is brought before the House or Senate by the sergeant at arms, tried at the bar of the body, and can be imprisoned in the Capitol jail.” Congress can do this, the report concluded, to compel them to testify or to punish them for their refusal to do so.

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/opinion/04tue4.html

Plus, I have heard of a story (I googled, but could not find it) where a Speaker ordered the Sergeant at Arms to go into D.C. to someone's house, arrest someone, and drag them to the floor of the House.

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