By Ramsey Touchberry
Washington Correspondent
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The U.S. House of Representatives voted along mostly partisan lines Wednesday to hold U.S. Attorney General William Barr in criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena regarding the Trump administration's prior push to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.
The move to hold the nation's top law enforcement chief in criminal contempt, rather than civil contempt — as has been done previously with Barr — further escalated tensions between the Democratic-led House and the administration, which has repeatedly directed current and former officials to not cooperate with congressional probes due to claims of White House privilege.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who had been subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee to provide testimony and documents, along with Barr, regarding the origins of adding the citizenship question, was also held in criminal contempt.
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Four Democrats — Jared Golden of Maine, Conor Lamb of Pennsylvania, Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey and Anthony Brindisi of New York — broke from party ranks to vote with Republicans against the contempt citations. Independent Justin Amash, the former Republican who became the first member of his former party to call for the president's impeachment, voted with Democrats in favor of contempt.
"I do not take this decision lightly," Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings said on the House floor. "Holding any secretary in criminal contempt of Congress is a serious and sober matter, one that I have done everything in my power to avoid. But in the case of the attorney general and the secretary, they blatantly obstructed our ability to do Congressional oversight."
In a joint letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Barr and Ross called the contempt vote "unjustified."
"We respectfully remind the [Oversight] Committee that the constitutionally required obligation to engage in good-faith accommodations cuts both ways," the men wrote. "By taking this action, the House is both unnecessarily undermining inter-branch comity and degrading the constitutional separation of powers and its own institutional integrity."
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The White House labeled the contempt vote as "another lawless attempt to harass the President and his Administration."
Representative Jim Jordan, the top Republican on Oversight, called it "another episode of political theater in an attempt to delegitimize the citizenship question."
Critics and Democrats have argued that including the question would have dissuaded minorities and immigrants from responding, resulting in skewed outcomes and, thus, used to gerrymander congressional districts in favor of Republicans. The administration and Republicans, however, have argued that asking the citizenship status of those living in the U.S. was a fair question.
But the Supreme Court's conservative majority had blocked the move to add the question, saying the administration's reasoning it was to enhance the enforcement of the Voting Rights Act lacked legal muster. Trump last week dropped his quest to include the question but still vowed they were "not backing down on our effort to determine the citizenship status of the United States population" by requesting records about citizens and non-citizens from various government agencies.
Cummings, a Maryland Democrat, described the vote as "long overdue," despite Republicans labeling the vote as premature. He said the committee first requested information from the Commerce Department in April 2018 and from the Justice Department in May 2018 before issuing their subpoenas earlier this year. The documents that they have so far received were either already publicly available, redacted or they failed to fulfill the subpoenas scope of demands, according to Cummings.
The Departments of Justice and Commerce have contested those claims, saying they've produced thousands of pages of documents on a rolling basis and made senior officials available for transcribed interviews with committee staffers.
Earlier this year, prior to the subpoenas being issued, Barr directed a Justice Department official to defy a congressional subpoena to testify about the matter.
In the hours leading up to the Oversight Committee's vote last month to send the contempt citations for the two officials to the full House for a vote, Trump, at the guidance of the Justice Department, issued an executive privilege claim.
"These documents are protected from disclosure by the deliberative process, attorney-client communications, or attorney work product components of executive privilege," Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd wrote in a letter to Cummings. "Regrettably, you have made these assertions necessary by your insistence upon scheduling a premature contempt vote."
Barr was held in civil contempt of Congress in May for his refusal to turn over former special counsel Robert Mueller's unredacted report and its underlying evidence to the Judiciary Committee. The House has since voted to provide the various committees investigating the administration whose requests for information have been stonewalled to unilaterally take legal action in federal court.
The Judiciary Committee and the Justice Department have since reached a deal to begin providing lawmakers with certain previously requested material.
So, the question remains: what happens next?
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The short answer is: not a whole lot — at least in the near future.
The criminal contempt citations will be referred to the U.S. attorney's office in Washington, D.C. for the Justice Department to prosecute. Or, in other words, the House has requested Barr's department to take legal action against Barr.
The responsibility to prosecute criminal contempt citations from Congress "lies within the control of the executive branch," according to the Congressional Research Service (CRS).
"Although approval of a criminal contempt citation under § 194 appears to impose a mandatory duty on the U.S. Attorney to submit the violation to a grand jury, the executive branch has repeatedly asserted that it retains the discretion to determine whether to do so," the CRS says.
Based on precedent, and the current political climate, it is almost certain the matter will not be brought before a grand jury. In each of the four times since 2008 that the House has held a current or former administration official in criminal contempt for defying a congressional subpoena, the CRS says "the executive branch determined not to bring the matter before a grand jury."
"In three of the four instances, the House also looked to the federal courts for civil enforcement of the outstanding subpoena," the CRS says, a route that House Democrats have taken on other matters. "The committees involved eventually obtained much of the information sought through those lawsuits, but only after prolonged litigation, and, in one of the cases, only after a judicial decision that could be viewed as potentially hindering Congress's access to executive branch information in the future."
Should a person be found guilty of criminal contempt, they could face a fine of up to $100,000 and a year in prison.
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