Texas Rep. Shelia Jackson Lee suggested Thursday that the House could pass a resolution authorizing all of its inquiries into the Trump administration — a step short of impeachment but which, she said, would give committee investigations more heft when challenged in the courts.

Ms. Jackson Lee, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, said the resolution would have to go through the committee process and be approved by a full House vote.

“We don’t want to do any of this if we can have our hearings and have the Article II body respond as it should,” she said. “But we have to do our job.”

She argued such a resolution would bolster Democrats’ case in the courts and the authorization of investigation “could not be challenged, or be difficult to challenge by the administrations whimsical comments of who can testify and who cannot testify.”

Her call came as Democrats kicked off their marathon reading of the entire 440-page Mueller report — with 25 members reading passages over 12 hours.

Ms. Jackson Lee, along with Judiciary Vice-Chair Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon and Rep. Sylvia Garcia, said the reading was to give the American people access to the report while Democrats fight to get special counsel Robert Mueller and former White House Counsel Don McGahn to testify.

“There’s a lot of average American people that have not seen the Mueller report, they still don’t understand what all the big whoo-ha-ha is about,” Ms. Garcia said. “So this is an attempt to make sure that the person that is curious who really doesn’t have the full-time dive through all this to be able to listen to it.”