According to Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, the chairman of the House Jan. 6 committee, it was the panel’s “obligation” to seek former President Donald Trump’s testimony as “the one person at the center of the story of what happened on January 6th.” And so the committee voted unanimously to subpoena the former president to produce documents and provide testimony about his activities that day.
But don’t hold your breath.
At this writing, Trump has yet to say publicly whether he will comply, but the smart money says he will ignore the subpoena or spend years fighting it.
Technically, committee members could ask the Department of Justice to charge Trump with contempt of Congress if, like his former aide Steve Bannon, he refuses to comply with the subpoena. That is what happened with Bannon: Last July, he was convicted on two misdemeanor charges for refusing to cooperate with the Jan. 6 committee. Sentencing is scheduled for later this month. But don’t hold your breath on that one either.
In fact, you have to go all the way back to the height of the Cold War and the hearings about Russian spies to find anyone who has been imprisoned for contempt of Congress.
Of course, the president can also go to court to try to challenge the subpoena, as his former White House counsel Donald McGahn did when subpoenaed by the House Judiciary Committee in 2019. That fight took two years and ended with a compromise.
The day after the vote, President Trump made public a screeching 14-page letter to the committee, which began — as usual — with his claim that the election was “RIGGED AND STOLEN.”
The president and his army of deniers have made the work of the Jan. 6 committee even more urgent. The attack on democracy has not ended, and in this fight, the House committee holds the high ground. The subpoena speaks volumes about the conclusions the committee has reached.
More than the courts, and even the Justice Department, what is central to Trump’s future is the midterm election. If Republicans take control of the House, that would likely be the end of the Jan. 6 committee. The Senate could take up its work, but only if it is in Democratic hands.
In normal times, this fall’s election would be about the economy — about the evils of inflation, the price of gasoline and the sense that the country is on the wrong track. But these are not normal times. Thanks to the Supreme Court, abortion and social issues also figure heavily in predicting the results, and those issues clearly favor Democrats. And thanks to the Jan. 6 committee, the fate of our democracy must be added to the list of issues being weighed by the electorate come November.
So even if the experts are right that there is little chance that Donald Trump will either testify or go to jail for his refusal to do so, it still matters that the committee voted as it did. After a year and a half of work, the vote leaves little doubt as to where ultimate responsibility belongs for what was not simply an assault on a building, but an attack on democracy. Trump has put our democracy on the ballot, and it just might be enough to sink his party, if not his own ship of state.
