With regard to the “Fast and Furious” imbroglio, then-Attorney General Eric Holder was held in contempt of Congress, and the House of Representatives had to take its complaints to the courts in order to seek redress. This case took years to resolve, only concluding last year, far too late for any meaningful oversight or accountability to materialize. As noted above, the House held Barr in contempt for a similar refusal to cooperate with a congressional inquiry, this time over a controversial plan to include a citizenship question on the 2020 census. But upon being held in contempt, Barr did nothing to comply further with the inquiry. It also bears mentioning that at nearly every turn of the House’s impeachment inquiry and associated investigations, the Trump administration flat-out refused to comply with subpoenas and even challenged Congress’s authority to conduct such an inquiry. The legal and constitutional realities that undermine the administration’s claims notwithstanding, this pattern of disdain for congressional oversight is a clear and present danger to our very system of checks and balances.

In all of these cases, Congress lost or forfeited an oversight battle with the executive branch and, as a result, the general credibility of congressional investigations and subpoenas has been dealt a series of significant blows. While Congress has held in contempt attorneys general in successive administrations, as well as other Cabinet-level officials, without carrying additional consequences the concept of a citation of contempt has lost some of its heft as a tool for oversight.

A recent proposal by Good Government Now, which is supported by the Project On Government Oversight (POGO), would reinvigorate the inherent contempt power of the House of Representatives—which is distinct from voting on largely symbolic citations of contempt—by adding more teeth to the mechanism and normalizing its use under certain conditions. The largely dormant inherent contempt power was originally designed to allow Congress to prosecute its own contempt proceedings by deploying the sergeant-at-arms to arrest an individual on the charge of contempt of Congress, whereupon that individual would undergo a trial of sorts conducted by Congress. This procedure had mostly fallen out of use by the early 20th century.

The enhanced inherent contempt power under the Good Government Now proposal would carry stringent financial penalties and a congressional adjudication process, with the aim of creating a genuine disincentive for the executive branch to ignore congressional oversight efforts. Ideas like this are important steps toward revitalizing oversight and accountability across government. After all, an impotent Congress is anathema to an accountable and effective federal government.