Overview

Committee investigations in the House of Representatives can serve several objectives. Most often, an investigation seeks to gather information either to review past legislation or develop future legislation, or to enable a committee to conduct oversight of another branch of government. These inquiries may be called legislative investigations because their legal authority derives implicitly from the House's general legislative power. Much more rarely, a House committee may carry out an investigation to determine whether there are grounds to impeach a federal official-a form of inquiry known as an impeachment investigation. While the labels legislative investigation and impeachment investigation provide some context to the objective or purpose of a House inquiry, an investigation may not always fall neatly into one of these categories. This ambiguity has been a topic of interest to many during the various ongoing House committee investigations concerning President Trump. On September 24, 2019, Speaker Pelosi announced that these investigations constitute an official impeachment inquiry. Although these committee investigations into allegations of presidential misconduct are proceeding, in the Speaker's words, under the umbrella of [an] impeachment inquiry, most appear to blend lawmaking, oversight, and impeachment purposes. However an investigation is labeled, because the Constitution provides the House with the sole Power of Impeachment, implementation of the impeachment power, including any ancillary investigative powers, would appear textually committed to the discretion of the House. Yet the House has not established a single, uniform approach to starting impeachment investigations. The process has instead evolved, generally tracking changes the House has made to its committee structure and the investigative authorities conferred to its committees. Although impeachment investigations have often been authorized by a House resolution, they have also been conducted without an explicit authorization. There are still other examples where the House provided express authorization only after a committee had engaged in a preliminary impeachment investigation. An impeachment investigation may be more likely-relative to a traditional legislative investigation-to obtain certain categories of information, especially from the executive branch. For example, it is possible that the significance of an exercise of the impeachment power, in conjunction with a resulting increase in political and public pressure, may itself affect the Executive's compliance decisions. But an impeachment investigation may also have legal impacts. If, in the face of a dispute with the executive branch over access to information, the House chose to seek judicial enforcement of an investigative demand, there appear to be at least three potential ways in which the impeachment power could, relative to a legislative investigation, provide the House with a stronger legal position. An impeachment investigation may (1) improve the likelihood of a court authorizing committee access to grand jury materials; (2) relieve any possible limitations imposed by the requirement that a committee act with a legislative purpose ; and (3) improve the likelihood that a committee will be able to overcome privilege assertions such as executive privilege. In the past, executive noncompliance with an impeachment investigation has also prompted the investigating committee to recommend to the House an article of impeachment for contempt of Congress. That said, a congressional committee engaged in a legislative investigation could arguably obtain much of the same information as it would during an impeachment inquiry, as both legislative and impeachment investigations constitute an exercise of significant constitutional authority.

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