January 6 Commission Subpoenas Are Meaningless Without Enforcement

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The January 6 Select Committee announced on Wednesday that it had issued a subpoena for former Trump Department of Justice official Jeffrey Clark. That followed news in the days before that other Trump-era officials, like Steve Bannon, have been called to appear.

That’s great, but until the Democratic-led House decides to actually enforce the summons, it’s hard to blame Trump figures for shrugging and ignoring them.

During the impeachment of Trump, the Trump team ignored subpoenas from the House and the Democratic response was characteristically limp.

The House has the power to arrest someone for ignoring a subpoena, it just has chosen not to use this power for decades.

We are in an extraordinary time, when an armed mob attacked the U.S. Capitol, seeking to do harm to the sitting Speaker of the House, the Vice President, and members of Congress with the expressed goal of overturning an election. At the same time the Republican Party has continued to embrace the core ethos of the mob, promoting lies about a stolen election while pushing for phony audits and other mechanisms to usurp the democratic process.

The Democratic Party, in response, has dug in deeper to its Pollyanna mindset and is not taking these threats seriously. The leaders of the party are acting as if the current derangement is a temporary deviation from the Republican norm, when in reality this is the party for the moment and the foreseeable future.

Right now, Congress has been toothless under the Democrats when it comes to this attack. Leaders wasted too much time pursuing a “bipartisan” investigation even as Republicans made it clear their intent is to cover up the attack and ride the fake stories around it to a new majority.

They must appropriately answer the Republicans who choose to defy their summons, or it is another nail in the coffin of American democracy.