Nancy Pelosi thought she had the perfect plan in place.
Then it all fell apart.
And Nancy Pelosi faced the one lawsuit that turned every Democrat’s life upside down.
Nancy Pelosi created the January 6 Select Committee to serve as a third impeachment of Donald Trump and to smear Republicans as the party of sedition heading into the 2022 midterms.
With the economy in shambles thanks to inflation, supply chain backlogs and labor shortages Democrats needed a fear and smear campaign to scare swing voters into keeping Democrats in control of the House of Representatives and the Senate.
The Select Committee was set to refer former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows for criminal prosecution over Meadows’ refusal to appear for a deposition.
But Meadows beat Pelosi’s committee to the punch and sued arguing that the committee itself was unconstitutional.
“The Select Committee acts absent any valid legislative power and threatens to violate longstanding principles of executive privilege and immunity that are of constitutional origin and dimension,” the suit argued.
There is a long case history of the Supreme Court restricting Congress’s ability to run fishing expeditions targeting private citizens.
Congress cannot just willy-nilly subpoena individuals.
A Congressional Research Service report explained that any subpoena “must be understood to include ‘inquiries into the administration of existing laws, studies of proposed laws, and surveys of defects in our social, economic or political system for the purpose of enabling the Congress to remedy them.’”
In 1955, the Supreme Court overturned the convictions of four Americans that refused to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
The justices ruled that Congress cannot take over the law enforcement powers of the executive branch of government writing that “the power to investigate must not be confused with any of the powers of law enforcement; those powers are assigned under our Constitution to the Executive and the Judiciary.”
This same case featured the court ruling against Congress even though the court recognized a threat of a communist insurrection.
In the ruling the justices ruled that Congress cannot dig into the private matters of private citizens to look for criminal conduct.
Nor could Congress haul American citizens before a committee just to punish them.
The justices wrote:
But, broad as is this power of inquiry, it is not unlimited. There is no general authority to expose the private affairs of individuals without justification in terms of the functions of the Congress. This was freely conceded by the Solicitor General in his argument of this case. Nor is the Congress a law enforcement or trial agency. These are functions of the executive and judicial departments of government. No inquiry is an end in itself; it must be related to, and in furtherance of, a legitimate task of the Congress. Investigations conducted solely for the personal aggrandizement of the investigators or to “punish” those investigated are indefensible.
The FBI arrested nearly 700 individuals related to the melee on January 6.
And the Bureau found no evidence of an organized plot to storm the Capitol and overthrow American democracy.
The case law from the 1950s establishes what the committee is currently doing – engaging in a criminal fact-finding expedition and attempting to punish Trump’s top aides – as unconstitutional.
This committee was Nancy Pelosi’s ace in the hole for 2022.
And now Pelosi may suffer a massive court loss that discredits the entire Soviet-style show trial the committee intended to conduct.
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