Those were the glory days of Congress’s subpoena power. Lock ’em up.

And while no one is proposing a revival of this method, one couldn’t blame some members from looking wistfully at the past.

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Congress’s power to enforce subpoenas by exercising its contempt power is now “really toothless,” said Randall Eliason, a former federal prosecutor who teaches at George Washington University Law School.

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The House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday authorized subpoenas to obtain the report of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. But it did not actually subpoena the report, in hopes that Attorney General William P. Barr will “reveal to us the entire Mueller report,” after negotiations on the matter, as committee chairman Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said.

But if he doesn’t, and the House seeks to enforce its will in court, it could take months or even years of litigation to reach a resolution, if indeed the courts choose to consider the matter.

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The reason, in part, is that Congress relies on the very Justice Department it is pursuing to prosecute the contempt citation.

And the Justice Department has, in the past, simply declined to do so.

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That leaves Congress only one route: a possibly interminable civil litigation.

In 2012, for example, then-Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. failed to comply with a House Oversight and Reform Committee subpoena seeking documents relating to a botched ATF firearms investigation known as “Fast and Furious.” The Justice Department declined to prosecute and a U.S. District Court didn’t rule until 2016 after Holder had left his job. The parties reached a negotiated settlement, which is in limbo even today.

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Similarly, in 2007, Congress held then-former White House counsel Harriet Miers in contempt after President George W. Bush claimed executive privilege to prevent her testimony in an investigation of the mass firings of U.S. attorneys.

The Justice Department refused to prosecute her, forcing Congress into a civil suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The case took two years, with Congress prevailing in the lower court. But the appeals court dragged its heels, and while the case was awaiting a decision, the 110th Congress went out of business on Jan. 3, 2009.

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Contempt citations expire when a Congress expires.

There was a time, in the 1970s and 1980s, when contempt proceedings were unnecessary. The subpoena itself and mere threat of contempt was generally sufficient to obtain compliance from even Cabinet-level officials.

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Public opinion played a role in compliance, said Mark J. Rozell, an expert on executive power and dean of the George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. It was just bad form to resist.

Congress was often able “to force the hand of the executive branch by creating significant political complications for the president. Before the era of hyperpartisan politics, he said, “the norm was to negotiate settlements and not take these battles as far as they seem to go now.”

“The loss of public support for Congress” over the years, “has had a profound impact” on that norm, Rozell said.

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Meanwhile, as Congress’s ability to enforce subpoenas weakened, the executive branch was busy carving out lofty reasons it need not comply with demands for documents — or tapes — from Congress or the courts.

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The most infamous example was President Richard M. Nixon’s claim of executive privilege in response to a judicial subpoena during the Watergate inquiries of the 1970s. The Supreme Court, in the 1974 ruling in U.S. v. Nixon , ruled against the president in the case involving the Watergate tapes.

But in that same decision it also acknowledged that there was such a thing as executive privilege, an imprimatur that encouraged its invocation by Nixon’s successors.

As a result, Congress’s authority receded further as presidents became more emboldened.

Although administrations in recent years have tried to avoid the actual phrase “executive privilege” because of its association with Nixon, Rozell said, presidents routinely invoke the principle to avoid cooperation with congressional oversight, as the Obama administration did in “Fast and Furious” and Bush did in the U.S. attorneys controversy.

Congress, dependent largely on moral force to get respect for its subpoenas, no longer has much.